Could Investing $10,000 in IonQ Make You a Millionaire?

Every investor dreams of producing incredible returns that allow them to turn a meager investment into more than $1 million. Several companies have turned a $10,000 investment into more than $1 million. The most recent example is Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA). If you invested $10,000 in Nvidia a decade ago, that investment is now worth nearly $3 million. That's an incredible run, and it showcases how important it is to have an offering that can serve a wide variety of use cases.

One industry where investors are looking for millionaire-maker stocks is quantum computing. Quantum computing has the potential to replace a lot of traditional computing power, including the graphics processing units (GPUs) infrastructure Nvidia has built out for artificial intelligence (AI).

If a worthy competitor arises from this sector, it could make investors a ton of money, potentially even $1 million. One of the top picks in this space is IonQ (NYSE: IONQ), but does it have the potential to turn a $10,000 investment into $1 million?

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IonQ is a leader in the quantum computing industry

The quantum computing industry is made up of two primary competitors: pure plays and legacy tech companies. Legacy tech companies include businesses like Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOG) (NASDAQ: GOOGL) and Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) that are well funded and can afford to throw however much money they'd like at the technology. The pure plays don't have this same luxury, as they are attempting to build a new business from scratch. This makes them incredibly risky, but if they pan out, they could provide incredible returns.

IonQ is one of the most popular pure-play companies for a good reason: It's leading the industry in computing accuracy. One of the primary problems with quantum computing right now is that the calculations aren't very accurate. IonQ is the leader in this realm, with its world-record-holding 99.99% 2-qubit gate fidelity. Most other companies have yet to achieve 99.9% 2-qubit gate fidelity, and that order of magnitude accuracy increase isn't easy to come by. Still, this measure indicates the computer will make an error once every 10,000 operations, which is likely too high for commercial adoption, as our current computers run millions of operations every second. But this leadership role allows IonQ to secure funding from investors and contracts from research institutions -- a key part in staying alive and funded while IonQ works toward a commercially viable product.

Time will tell how this pans out for IonQ, but its current status is a positive sign for investors. But does it have the potential to turn $10,000 into $1 million?

IonQ would need to become a trillion-dollar company to achieve this lofty goal

IonQ's current market cap hovers around $16 billion. So, for IonQ to achieve 100-fold returns, it would need to become a $1.6 trillion company. That's no small feat, and may seem like an incredibly lofty goal. But let's backtrack to what level of sales would be required to support a business valuation like that.

Let's assume IonQ can achieve a 50 times earnings valuation with a profit margin of 30%. If it can do those two things, it would need to generate $106 billion in sales to be worth $1.6 trillion. That's a huge amount of sales it must produce, but if IonQ can build a quantum computing unit that can replace a product like Nvidia's GPUs, it may be able to achieve that goal.

Nvidia has generated $165 billion in revenue over the past 12 months and has several billion dollars' worth of orders for its advanced computing chips over the next five quarters. If IonQ can capture that market share, then it may be able to generate the amount of revenue required to achieve a 100-fold return.

That's a lot of guessing, and I prefer my investments to be a bit more concrete than that. Still, if IonQ can become the ultimate quantum computing winner, there's a ton of room to run for the stock. But there's a lot of time between now and a commercially viable quantum computing launch, and there's no guarantee IonQ will be the provider of that product.

Keithen Drury has positions in Alphabet and Nvidia. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Alphabet, Microsoft, and Nvidia. The Motley Fool recommends IonQ and recommends the following options: long January 2026 $395 calls on Microsoft and short January 2026 $405 calls on Microsoft. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.