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Our next speaker leads a company that is especially important to both the quantum industry and to the community hosting us here today. Niccolo Damasius, Chairman and CEO of IonQ, they're one of our platinum sponsors and they're a company with very deep roots right here in College Park. Niccolo brings an unusual combination of experiences to this role. He's a physicist by training. He's having studied quantum mechanics at Cambridge, but he's also a highly experienced technology executive, investor, and public company leader. In fact, Niccolo helped lead IonQ's transition into the public markets in 2021. He joined the company's board and he became CEO in the last year. Since then, he's pursued an ambitious vision to build IonQ into something more broader than a quantum computing company, but a full-stack quantum technology platform, spanning computing, networking, sensing, security, and space. And this year, with the acquisition of Skywater Technology, Ionq has added advanced semiconductor manufacturing to that platform, bringing together quantum science, engineering, manufacturing, and commercialization and a vertically integrated company. That's particularly exciting for us because IonQ was born from research conducted right here at the University of Maryland. And its headquarters remains here in College Park. So in many ways, Ionq represents exactly what we hope a healthy quantum ecosystem can produce. World-class research, becoming a company, a company attracting talent and capital, and that company's scaling technology toward real-world impact. We're grateful for IonQ's leadership, its platinum sponsorship of the Quantum World Congress, and its continuing investment in this region. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming Niccolo Damasi. Well, it is wonderful to be in the capital of quantum and great to see so many familiar faces in the audience. It's also, of course, a humbling honor and privilege to be speaking after our great Governor Wes Moore, who's done so much, of course, for Maryland, but as importantly, if not more importantly, for Quantum World Congress and all of us here today. I'm going to be speaking about quantum for resilience for the next few minutes. And I'm going to talk you through what I think that means, not just for state and local government, but also national governments, talking through how INQ provides that, I'm going to close with a few reflections on how SkyWater is helping to accelerate many of our roadmaps, including INQ's. So what is resilience? And what is the quantum age that we are all ushering in here at QWC 2026? And what a journey it's been the last six, seven years since the Capital of Quantum Initiative was declared and since Governor Moore took up the challenge of making this very state and region the leader, not just for the U.S., but for the world. You know, we at INQ believe that we've had the industrial age, the internet age, the AI age, and we think the quantum age is not just next, but it's already here. And it's going to be driven by sovereign infrastructure because resilience is no longer just defensive. obviously a competitive advantage. The world we live in in 2026 looks different than it did a decade ago before the capital of quantum initiative began. Problems remain challenging to solve in some places. Geopolitical shifts are obviously something we all contend with. Encryption has an expiration date. We'll talk a bit more about that. And obviously workforce development and education is something near and dear to everyone's heart. So INQ believes that by investing in quantum technologies you can drive resilience into your state community institution and turn risk into advantage in the face of these disruptions. We believe there are six components to driving sovereign resilience and by sovereign it can be for your enterprise, it can be for our city, community, state, government or even national governments And we think it's about what you can see, what you can train, what can secure, how you make decisions, how you discover new applications in cutting-edge applied science, and of course, how we connect ourselves together to create the future of the quantum internet. Now, INQ has built the world's first, foremost, and largest quantum platform in history. Our roots are here, with our founder's paper in 1994 from UMD building the world's first quantum logic gate. We were the first public company in the sector and we remain the largest but we have grown ourselves from computing to do everything from networking to sensing to security to of course merchant supplying precisely because we believe resilience is at the heart of everyone's mission in the coming years and decade. Let's start with security. I think we all know that the world has changed from a cyber perspective in just the last year alone. It's incredible how many risks have come into the marketplace with LLMs and what I call the the lab leaks that we're seeing from anthropic and open AI. So there is a risk from AI enabled cyber threats and of course for those who saw it on September 8th we we built not only the world's first full fault tolerant shovel ready architecture that we call the walking cat architecture in April, but we followed that up just a few weeks ago with an elliptical encryption retrieval paper that was published in deep consultation with our security services about how a 20,000 physical system could retrieve elliptial encryption keys in about three or four weeks. Every institution, every nation, every state and local government needs defense in depth. Security is near and dear to our hearts. Without it, it is hard to be able to keep working on all of our exciting quantum technologies. We believe defense in depth means you need PQC and QKD and related compartmentalization technologies because cyber threats, unfortunately, they're increasing. There will be bad actors who take, unfortunately the worst or best in their mind of what LLMs can do and what quantum computers can do. security is the solution both in the future era as well as the present era against these threats. Moving on to what we can see and sense. Navigation and sensing is actually the quantum technology that all of us use every day. You all have GPS in your phone, and so it's probably the highest TRL level, technology readiness level, of all quantum technologies. Now, INQ has a large stake in the future of GPS. We make the world's most accurate peak-of-second commercially available atomic clocks. We also own our own buses and satellite fleet. And so we like to say that we do quantum sensing from submarines to satellites. And together we are pulling the strands that we need to build GPS that's a thousand times more accurate not only for our nation but our allies. And the beautiful thing about our quantum platform is that we're also bringing image change detection into this. So using our quantum computers and our satellite signals capabilities, you can see that already we're getting significant improvements in things like spotting differences and errors that come into play through satellite imagery. The power of picosecond timing is upon us, and it's not just a question of what atomic clocks can do, but it's what the future of the data center is. It's, of course, also the future, ultimately, of how all of us are going to keep track of where we are and what's going on in the world. And this is a mission that we work with DARPA on through their About Time initiative, and it's also something that we hold near and dear to our hearts, given the importance of timekeeping in all navigation on a global basis. Moving on to how we connect ourselves, trusted quantum networks. Now, it's been a really big week for INQ. For those following the news, we've put out five or six compelling, cutting-edge, pioneering, trailblazing partnerships, and it's not just been computers with networks at EPB and AFRL, but more recently this week we announced one with the Republic of Korea and a fine partner of ours called STT, and of course we are the anchor system in NVIDIA's new NVAQC center in Boston. And so we know that the future is not just about how we make these computers as powerful as possible, but it's also how do we ultimately network them. Just two weeks ago, we announced that we had 4X'd our own record from 2024 with the world's fastest entanglement rate. We're now at a kilohertz, and that's a tremendously exciting moment in the science of photonic interconnects using the incredible researchers and technology that we've had at INQ and we've brought to INQ in the last couple of years. When I think about the ecosystem, Governor Moore not only preaches the importance of ecosystem, but we are delivering it here in Maryland at the capital of quantum. At INQ, we're very focused on every layer of this ecosystem and stack. We work with about a dozen other quantum companies. We use our integrated photonics, atomic clocks, quantum foundry solutions, and we want to work with everyone who is here. And so our Skywater foundry is near and dear to our heart and something we've been getting incredible results with ourselves. It is ready and available now, and would love to see everyone enjoy the same cycle time acceleration we have. You've heard us talk about quantum memories and quantum repeaters and quantum networking and you've also heard us talked about of course the importance of algorithms and this ecosystem that we are building today at QWC and continue to accelerate through the great state of Maryland and through the capital of quantum is exactly what makes this industry go faster and faster and makes things move to the left on our roadmap as I like to say. Discovery and the side. Obviously applications and optimization are where hardware and theory meets the real world. And it's been an incredible year for INQ, an incredible for all of us as we look at how we unlock sovereign quantum advantage for enterprise, state and local government, and nations. And by sovereign I mean people who want to control their data. Increasingly in this world, you want to make sure you maintain and control your hardware and your systems because it gives you better access, gives you more, you know, control and it also of course gives you shorter cycle times. In the last 6 to 12 months we've made progress in all of these areas. Computational engineering, portfolio optimization, computational drug design, of course logistics, manufacturing and improving how LLMs learn. But we didn't stop there. We've We've made dramatic progress in areas like protein folding, in areas that we said on September 8th that our analyst day involved even GLPs, and needless to say, pattern detection, early signal detection remains a superpower for IMQ quantum computers as it has been since our IPO. We invest about $500 million a year in R&D, and it is growing because we know that the core of our company is scientific excellence, that we are then able to turn into engineering prowess, and of course ultimately into manufacturing, commercialization, and an increasingly mass market industry. Speaking of which, the talent pool obviously is not only what powers all of us, but it's also, I believe, the most important thing for us to invest in to enable our industry to continue to grow. We have seen how leadership, tone from the top, connectivity, ecosystems, and of course ultimately the flywheel we're all creating here are broadening and deepening the talent pool. And so all of us today are a big part of compounding value in the quantum ecosystem. Places like Maryland and College Park that are driving this wonderful feedback loop between local quantum infrastructure, human capital, and of course, building businesses, growing businesses and scaling businesses have a huge advantage and they're obviously critical to the development of all of our companies. Building the pipeline of talent from universities, obviously vital to how we scale our business. You know, INQ has gone from 35 people in 2019, 80 at our IPO, maybe 350 a couple years ago, to now 3,500. And that scaling only happens with the talent pipeline that we can continue to, of course, row on. Not only, of, course, has Maryland been a fantastic leader in the sector, but our White House administration has also been powerful at driving policy and historic action. And we are hugely proud of the fact that from sensing to computing to networking to space, we are in many DARPA programs, many DUI programs. And we continue to be a close partner of both the White House, our administration, and Maryland DMV around topics of national security. So INQ set out to build the world's first quantum platform, and we did just that in the last couple of years. From our quantum foundry to our emergency supply services to security, networking, sensing, and computing, we are finding that more and more of our customers, governments, enterprise, state and local partners want sovereign resilience, want sovereign control, and recognize the importance of our platform interoperating. And so we sent an earnings call last quarter that about a third of our customers are buying more than one product from us, and about a 1 third of customers are international, which is an exciting development for the capital of quantum to see the reach of what companies born here can do, not just in the DMV and nationwide, but also what we're doing in Europe and increasingly in Asia. I'm going to close on our core business, which is and always will be our compute business. We have had a remarkable year. As many of you know who follow us, compute has seen acceleration at INQ, both organically, inorganically, and because of our enormous investments in core science, core engineering, but also how we accelerate these learnings into the real world in a commercializing, manufacturable way. I am hugely proud of the fact that our global compute footprint continues to grow. It has been a record year for us, not only the hours of compute time we've supplied, but also the number of systems. And you can see on this map, as it continues to go, how many compute deployments we have had. And they continue to grow just this week. We're in the first inning of computing, as we are many quantum technologies. But it's an inning that is important in the history books, and all of us are a big part of making this history happen for our children, our grandchildren, and our nation. Commercial impact and deployability has always been near and dear to INQ's heart. We knew when we went public, and we were the first public company in the world in our sector, that doing so was a decision, a decision that said we wanted to tap into broader capital markets, but with it comes great responsibility to be stewards for our sector, stewards of capital from our shareholders, but also to be realistic about how we power forward from R&D to engineering to manufacturing to commercialization to increasingly make the future happen sooner. And we have done this time and time again as we knock through our engineering challenges, speed up our time to solution, increase our fidelity, and make our all-to-all connectivity and parallel gate architecture the most commercially available commercially ready today. It's been a big year for us, not only in reducing the cost per qubit in partnership with our friends of Skywater, but also in speeding up learning. You know, turning eight, nine month cycle times into two months is an amazing opportunity for all of us. It means you can do exponentially more work every year and every two years and every generation of our machines that come out. And it's not just INQ, but all of us have this opportunity with Skywater, and I urge you to talk to us and embrace this, because we are here to support our industry, everyone at Quantum World Congress, and to ensure that our nation prevails in this very important geopolitical race that will power not only our economy in the 21st century, but our national security in the 24th century. INQ's roadmap has accelerated a lot in the last year and this roadmap we actually published last June and we updated every quarter every time we have an earnings call and we're deeply proud of the fact that we hit our milestones and we do what we say we're going to do. We only need to shrink dyes and tile to expand our architecture in our new superior range of machines, which are being made right here in College Park, as well as in other locations, to enable us to keep up with demand on both sides of the Atlantic. Our Superion range is upgradable, which is unique and really exciting. Between generations, we can swap out the chip and make the machine doubly exponentially more powerful. And whilst it looks sleek on the outside and it can sit in the data center and withstand the vibrations of any classical computing GPU-based architecture. On the inside, it is, of course, as complex as you saw in the video. And I'm thankful to all my colleagues who make miracles happen and make the unbelievably complicated run and run algorithms and run algorithms more powerfully every single day. Couple big commercial advances for INQ this week, for which I want to thank my colleagues for all their tremendous work on and thank our partners, both at Florida International University and at SDT and the nation of Korea for adopting us and embracing us as a son and daughter of theirs as well. Countries want to grow ecosystems with INQ and of course, so do states and so do universities. And we're excited of course first amongst equal this week with the fact that our partnership with NVIDIA We'll begin to make hybrid workflows accelerate things exactly the way we're all used to working with classical input devices, talking to a quantum computer, talking to classical output device. I think there's going to be an incredibly vibrant set of research in the coming quarters and year about how we can get the best out of what NVIDIA's got and what, of course, INQ's roadmap is doing also. It's really never been a better time to be in the research, commercialization, manufacturing, or of course, ultimately, broader quantum platform initiatives, and whenever someone asks me what their children or grandchildren should study, I always say, like, this is a no-brainer. Look at what we've been able to do with our roadmap, accelerating this with Skywater, accelerating this our superion range. We're just getting started at INQ, even though we're 30 years in the making, and I have no doubt that the 21st century will be one where the standards for computing remain in the U.S., are driven by the U. S., and with this kind of progress in just the next year or two, full fault tolerance will be affordable within grasp of enterprises, not just in the Fortune 500, but the Fortune 5000, and for state and local government of all sizes, both here in the Five Eyes and across our broader allied community. So I thank you all for your attention, I thank all of you for your tremendous support, I thank the state of Maryland for all they've done for INQ and all of us, and I want to give us all a huge round of applause for making this the very best QWC we've ever had and preparing to make next year even better. Thank you so much everyone. Have a great rest of your afternoon. Look forward to talking to many of you. Thank you.