Key Takeaways
- On the All-In podcast, Martin Shkreli said quantum computers will never beat NVIDIA’s GPUs at AI. By his count, GPUs spend 99.9% of their time multiplying lists of numbers.
- AI work looks set to stay on GPUs, so IonQ, Rigetti and D-Wave have to earn their valuations in smaller markets like security and research.
- Rigetti burned $77.2 million of free cash flow in fiscal 2025, and IonQ’s latest deal is in cybersecurity.
- IonQ trades at 19.5x forward sales, its lowest in three years, but that still prices in a much bigger market than it has today.
Martin Shkreli has a warning for anyone holding IonQ (IONQ), Rigetti Computing (RGTI) or D-Wave Quantum (QBTS): the AI boom isn’t coming to save them.
On a new episode of the All-In podcast, billed in part as “Betting Against Quantum,” the former hedge fund manager and pharma executive summed up his case in one line:
“They’ll never beat an NVIDIA machine.”
That’s a direct shot at the most valuable workload in computing.
Quantum has one magic trick
Shkreli grants that quantum computers can solve a narrow class of problems far faster than any classical machine, like factoring the huge numbers behind modern encryption. Then he takes the air out of it:
“But to a business person, unless you’re in the business of factoring numbers, there’s not a whole lot to be excited about here.”
Outside that trick, he argues, the speedups are small and the machines have no real memory. “There’s no such thing as quantum RAM,” he said, so any problem has to come with a tiny input. That rules out the mountains of data AI runs on.
AI is NVIDIA’s math problem
AI mostly comes down to matrix multiplication. By Shkreli’s count, that’s nearly all a GPU does: “multiplying two lists of numbers is what a GPU spends 99.9% of its time doing.”
He also says the customer who’d matter most isn’t interested: “Every time somebody pitches OpenAI, from what I’ve heard about quantum computer, they say, no, we’re not interested.” (He admits that one is secondhand.)
One of the hosts made the bull case: quantum is where the transistor was before anyone built software on top of it. Shkreli shot back: “would you go long punch cards and vacuum tubes, right?” Those, he noted, “were stocks at one point.”
The businesses are still small
IonQ’s revenue has grown quickly.
It went from $2.1 million in fiscal 2021 to $130 million in fiscal 2025. But IonQ also closed six acquisitions in 2025, including Oxford Ionics, Capella Space and id Quantique, so part of that jump came from the businesses it bought.
Rigetti, meanwhile, hasn’t come close to paying its own way.
It has burned cash every year since fiscal 2021, including $77.2 million in fiscal 2025, on roughly $13 million of revenue. That’s a lot to burn while waiting for a market big enough to pay for it.
NVIDIA’s $1 billion points the same way
The obvious objection: NVIDIA (NVDA) is spending on quantum itself. On Oct. 8, it committed $1 billion over five years to U.S. science, and quantum computing was one of the fields it named.
Look at where the quantum money goes, though. It’s aimed at systems that combine quantum and classical computers, and at NVIDIA’s own CUDA-Q platform for simulating and controlling quantum processors. In that picture, the quantum chip plugs into a supercomputer full of GPUs and handles the odd problem they can’t. The AI workload stays right where Shkreli says it will.
IonQ’s latest deal tells a similar story. Last week it agreed to buy cybersecurity company Elisity in an all-stock deal worth up to $1.3 billion, to pair with its own encryption and quantum key distribution products. The stock fell 9% on the news. That’s a security business built around the one trick Shkreli says quantum does well.
The price still assumes a much bigger market
To be fair, the market has already let a lot of air out of IonQ.
It trades at 19.5x forward sales, its lowest in three years. Over those three years it averaged 75.8x and peaked at 215.2x in October 2025.
Still, 19.5x forward sales is the kind of price investors pay for a company about to win a big new market.
I think Shkreli is right about AI. GPUs keep that work, so the quantum stocks have to earn their prices in security, government research and science, where the problems are small enough to fit. Those can be real businesses. They just have a long way to grow to support a price like IonQ’s.
Of course, quantum hardware is improving fast. IonQ’s next quarterly report, its first with SkyWater Technology in it, will show how much of its growth is coming from computing.
So what is IonQ stock actually worth?
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