IonQ’s move toward chip-level integration (via Oxford Ionics) plus its multi-cloud neutrality directly parallels what NVIDIA did for GPUs in 2006—creating an open-access compute layer that every major cloud provider must now integrate.
IBM, by contrast, risks becoming the “Intel Inside” of quantum—powerful but enclosed—while IonQ becomes the “NVIDIA of Quantum” with API-first ubiquity across all platforms.