IonQ's purchase of chipmaker SkyWater clears FTC review as NIST sends entangled photons 62 kilometers on overhead fiber
US antitrust reviewers ended their look at IonQ's acquisition of quantum chip manufacturer SkyWater Technologies days before NIST disclosed that entangled photons survived a 62-kilometer round of ordinary, mostly pole-mounted telecom fiber.
The US Federal Trade Commission granted early termination of its investigation into IonQ’s proposed acquisition of SkyWater Technologies on July 31, 2026, according to a press release from the agency. IonQ develops quantum computers; SkyWater Technologies manufactures quantum chips. Chairman Andrew Ferguson and Commissioner Mark Meador each issued separate statements in connection with the decision.
Days later, on Aug. 5, 2026, the National Institute of Standards and Technology announced a separate result on the networking side of the same technology stack. Researchers from NIST, the Joint Quantum Institute, the University of Maryland and the company Qunnect distributed entangled photons across 62 kilometers, about 38.5 miles, of deployed commercial optical fiber in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., NIST said. The experiment was run in early 2025 and the paper appeared online on July 15, 2026 in the Journal of Optical Communications and Networking, DOI 10.1364/JOCN.592521, with Yicheng Shi as first author and NIST’s Oliver Slattery and Thomas Gerrits among the co-authors.
What distinguishes the run, according to NIST, is the fiber itself. Most of the cable used was strung on utility poles and therefore exposed to temperature swings, wind and birds. Classical communications encode information in the intensity of light and are relatively tolerant of that kind of mechanical disturbance; the entangled states in the experiment were encoded in photon polarization, which is vulnerable to twisting of the fiber. Entangled photon pairs were produced with commercial devices, and one photon of each pair was measured for polarization at an analyzer in a NIST laboratory.
To hold the link together, the team used equipment developed by Qunnect that sends a reference beam down the fiber, measures how polarization has been rotated and applies the inverse correction in real time. Over 24 hours the system successfully distributed entanglement 92.8% of the time, with 7.2% of the time spent on polarization correction, and transmitted about 1,500 entangled photons per second, NIST said. Statistical tests confirmed that both photons of a pair remained entangled. By comparison, European researchers set a distance record of 248 kilometers over underground fiber in 2022.
NIST listed possible applications including linking distant telescopes for joint observation, sensor networks for earthquake and volcano detection, connecting quantum computers to one another and ultra-secure communications. The agency said transmission rates will need to improve before the approach is practical.
The two announcements are unrelated proceedings — one an antitrust clearance, the other a research result — but together they mark activity at both ends of the quantum build-out in the United States: consolidation of chip manufacturing capacity under a quantum computing developer, and evidence that existing telecom infrastructure can carry quantum signals without being rebuilt.