FTC approves IonQ's $1.8 billion purchase of SkyWater foundry business

The Federal Trade Commission cleared IonQ’s purchase of SkyWater Technology’s semiconductor foundry business, removing the last federal hurdle from a $1.8 billion deal that joins a College Park, Maryland quantum company with a Bloomington, Minnesota manufacturing asset.

FTC Chairman Andrew N. Ferguson said on July 31 that the commission had granted early termination of its review earlier that week in the IonQ-SkyWater matter, identified as Matter Number 2610061. Ferguson said, “I did not prefer this outcome,” and noted that the commission was split, a sign that the merger raised real competitive questions even as it survived federal antitrust scrutiny.

The transaction matters well beyond one balance sheet because foundry capacity sits near the center of U.S. chip strategy. Large-scale chipmakers dominate mass production, but specialty foundries do the prototyping, niche manufacturing and advanced research that newer technologies depend on. SkyWater, described by the companies as the largest exclusively U.S.-based semiconductor foundry, gives IonQ access to domestic fabrication capacity at a moment when Washington is trying to keep sensitive technology and manufacturing onshore.

IonQ agreed to buy SkyWater on January 25, 2026, and said the combination would give it embedded access to a trusted U.S. foundry and accelerate its fault-tolerant quantum computing roadmap. The company also said the merged business would be the only vertically integrated full-stack quantum platform company. In materials filed with regulators, IonQ said 200,000-qubit quantum processing units enabling 8,000 ultra-high fidelity logical qubits were expected to start functional testing in 2028, and that the deal could accelerate development of a 2,000,000-qubit chip by up to a year.

SkyWater said it would continue to serve customers as a U.S.-based semiconductor foundry after the acquisition, preserving a domestic manufacturing node that could support research, testing and hardware development for quantum and other advanced systems. IonQ said on July 31 that it had completed the acquisition, putting the transaction into effect just as federal regulators finished their review.

For policymakers, the approval suggests a greater willingness to tolerate vertical integration when companies present it as strategic infrastructure rather than simple market concentration. In a Washington push that already includes subsidies, research partnerships and tighter scrutiny of foreign access to sensitive technologies, the IonQ-SkyWater deal shows how control of specialized manufacturing has become part of the contest over American industrial capacity.