Why IonQ Inc. (IONQ) Soared Last Week?

We recently published a list of 10 Firms Defy Market Slump, Record Double-Digit Gains Last Week. In this article, we are going to take a look at where IonQ Inc. (NYSE:IONQ) stands against other firms that defied the market slump and recorded double-digit gains last week.

The stock market may have taken a beating for most of the week, but it was able to recover losses on Friday, as investors gobbled up shares while weighing the impact of the US-China trade war.

Among all major indices, the tech-heavy Nasdaq registered the highest gain, up 7.29 percent, followed by the S&P 500 with 5.7 percent, and the Dow Jones by 4.95 percent.

Ten companies, predominantly in the gold and biopharmaceutical sectors, were the week’s top performers as investors sought haven from their stocks amid market uncertainties.

In this article, we have identified last week’s 10 highest gainers and detailed the reasons behind their gains.

To come up with the list, we considered only the stocks with a $2 billion market capitalization and $5 million trading volume.

The week-on-week prices were based on the companies’ closing prices on Friday as against on April 4, or a week earlier.

A quantum computer on a countertop in an engineering laboratory with a technician at work.

IonQ Inc. saw its share prices jump by 26.16 percent week-on-week at $26.09 versus $20.68 on April 4 after being one of the 15 companies tapped by the Department of Defense to explore the possibility of building a useful quantum computer that can achieve utility-scale operation.

According to the DND, IONQ and its 14 quantum computing peers will work with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to scale their technology toward creating a utility-scale quantum computer.

The companies will provide “comprehensive technical details of their concepts to show that they hold water and could plausibly lead to a transformative, fault-tolerant quantum computer in under 10 years.”

Companies that will successfully complete the first stage will advance in the next year-long phase, during which DARPA will analyze their research and development approach.

A final stage will follow, where the QBI independent verification and validation (IV&V) team will test the firms’ computer hardware.

Overall, IONQ ranks 9th on our list of firms that defied the market slump and recorded double-digit gains last week. While we acknowledge the potential of IONQ as an investment, our conviction lies in the belief that AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns and doing so within a shorter time frame. There is an AI stock that went up since the beginning of 2025, while popular AI stocks lost around 25%. If you are looking for an AI stock that is as promising as IONQ but that trades at less than 5 times its earnings, check out our report about this cheapest AI stock.