And simple things like, getting the process repeatable. And of course, as you, in the past we might have built one or two systems in a generation. Now as you just heard, we’re building five in Forte Enterprise. And as you would expect, by the time you get to the fifth one, you’ve gotten better at it and it’s just getting faster. So, we’re not quite yet to the Henry Ford assembly line for quantum computers just yet, but that’s where we’re trying to hit.
Shadi Mitwalli: Awesome. That’s all for me and congrats on the solid quarter.
Peter Chapman: Thank you.
Operator: Our next question is from David Williams with Benchmark.
David Williams: Hey. Good afternoon. Thanks for taking my question. I guess first, Peter, just thinking about the five Forte Systems that you’re building in Seattle, clearly you’ve got a lot of confidence if you’re going to go and build these systems maybe ahead of the contract. So I guess if you were going to candy cap or qualify, how you’re thinking about your contracts and your bookings here, given the investment in those five Forte machines, how would you rank that in terms of maybe where you were 90 days ago? I know it’s clearly more confident, but it feels maybe more solidified given you’re moving forward with building those?
Peter Chapman: Yeah. No. You’re 100% right. The things are not, the parts themselves are not cheap. So you wouldn’t go out and make the expense unless you thought you could sell them, and at the same time, these are big ticket sales. So, predicting exactly which quarter or something it will appear in is always risky. So obviously over some reasonable period of time, we do think that we have a pretty good shot of selling the remaining four, right? We’ve already sold one. So…
David Williams: Okay.
Peter Chapman: So, it’s the remaining four.
David Williams: All right. Thanks for the color there. And then maybe just secondly, you talked about some new application areas that you’re particularly excited about and you gave an example of pharmaceuticals. Can you maybe talk through some of the other areas of where you think there’s some really great opportunity and maybe where you’re most excited? Thanks.
Peter Chapman: So, some of the things which we’ve already kind of signposted, which is obviously quantum machine learning, is something that we continue to believe will be one of the first applications. Pharmaceuticals in particular, we’re very excited about. There’s been a lot of recent work at IonQ and others in terms of making progress on being able to simulate chemistry. So, we’re excited about that work. Optimization is always a sweet spot for quantum. So that would be as well. And then, the last one, which is probably at the moment, maybe the highest speculative one, which would be strong AI or AI in the more like ChatGPT or better sense. So I’m trying to separate out ML from AI.
David Williams: Okay. Great. Thanks again.
Operator: [Operator Instructions] Our next question is from Kevin Garrigan with WestPark Capital.
Kevin Garrigan: Yeah. Hey, guys. Let me echo my congrats on all the progress. I’m just wondering if you can give us some color on commercial and enterprise customer adoption for quantum computing. Are any of those types of customers seeing sales expansion in your pipeline as well?
Peter Chapman: I think, all across the Board in quantum, if you look kind of what’s going on, regionally within the United States and across the world, there’s quite a bit of an investment available and interest in systems, and if nothing, that seems to be heating up. So it’s certainly a good time to be in quantum at the moment.
Kevin Garrigan: Yeah. No. I definitely agree with that. Okay. Perfect. And just as a quick follow up kind of going off of Quinn’s question on the $50 million regarding the government opportunities, are these kind of new opportunities or projects that the government, are they starting to figure out how to use quantum computers or are they kind of geared more towards the current computers that the government has just kind of aren’t good enough to perform the application that they’re — that they want. So they’re looking to switch to something better such as quantum computing?
Peter Chapman: I think increasingly — it’s increasingly lots of people, not just, IonQ has thought this for quite a long time, but it’s just — we’re starting to see people start to say, hey, actually this quantum thing actually might be real. And so, there’s — there even the naysayers are actually coming out now and saying, hey, we actually might have useful quantum computing in the near future. And that obviously spreads into the government as well. And so — and I’m just talking about it broadly across the entire industry. So, there’s been lots of work on recently on fault tolerance is an example that gives people confidence about quantum in general. So, if you were to go back, it’s just funny to go back five years, I’ve been at the company five years, five years ago, people said, oh, you don’t even know you could build a quantum computer.
And then it was, oh, you’ll never be able to build a quantum computer with fault tolerance and now we’re getting to the point where it’s like, oh, that actually looks like that might be reasonable. So we’re making progress. It’s a slow — it’s a bit of a slow process, but we’re getting there.
Kevin Garrigan: Yeah. No. Absolutely. Okay. Perfect. Thanks, guys.
Operator: Ladies and gentlemen, we have reached the end of the question-and-answer session, and I would like to turn the call back to Peter Chapman for closing remarks.
Peter Chapman: I want to thank everyone for joining us today and all the questions. Finally, I want to thank the entire IonQ team for the continued diligent work that allowed us to achieve everything we have so far and everything we look forward to in the future. Thanks again, everyone.
Operator: This concludes today’s conference. Thank you for your participation. You may disconnect your lines at this time.
