IonQ (NYSE: IONQ) announced the Superion 256, its sixth-generation quantum computing platform, at its 2026 Investor Day held at the New York Stock Exchange. The company said it is accepting orders now, with customer deliveries planned for 2027. IonQ disclosed that it pre-sold its first Superion 256 system in the first quarter of 2026.

The Superion 256 is a 256-qubit system built around IonQ's Electronic Qubit Control technology, which uses electronics integrated on the chip rather than laser systems to control trapped-ion qubits. The first chips were fabricated at IonQ's subsidiary SkyWater, and the company said its design cycle compressed from nine months to two months while delivering 12 times more wafer lots over a six-month period compared to a previous foundry. IonQ said first ions have been trapped in prototype systems now being built at multiple U.S. facilities.

The system is designed for standard data center server rack footprints and draws less power than a rack of GPUs, according to the company.

"Superion 256 is the first quantum computer platform designed to be built by the hundreds rather than one at a time," said Niccolo de Masi, Chairman and CEO of IonQ.

IonQ said the Superion platform is designed to scale from 256 qubits to millions of qubits. The company is concurrently developing the Superion 10K, which integrates CMOS onto the chip. IonQ said it expects CMOS integration to reach fault tolerance in a lab setting in 2027 and commercial availability in 2028. The company also said it expects the shift from laser-based to semiconductor-based control to reduce cost-per-qubit by more than 300 times across its roadmap.

The Superion 10K is built to run IonQ's Walking Cat architecture, a blueprint published in April 2026 covering how applications compile into instructions, how errors are corrected, and how ions move across the chip. Production-grade Superion 256 systems will also be offered through IonQ's cloud platform.