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SpaceX Plans Starlink Mobile, Telecom Stocks Drop

Shares of telecom stocks are trading lower after SpaceXoutlined plans to compete with the largest U.S. mobile carriers with its own Starlink Mobile service. During the company's earnings call, President and COO Gwynne Shotwell said she expects SpaceX to win customers from AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile, arguing the company's service will be stronger.EARNINGS:SpaceX reported its first quarterly results as a public company, showing its AI business growing rapidly and swinging to an adjusted profit. However, the company also disclosed nearly $16B in AI infrastructure spending for the quarter – more than six times the segment's revenue – sending the stock down as much as 10% in early Wednesday trading.PLANS TO COMPETE WITH CARRIERS:During its earnings call, the company detailed plans to compete with the largest U.S. mobile carriers. COO Gwynne Shotwell said, "I anticipate us being able to acquire quite a few of their customers, because I think our service will be better," adding that she's "quite excited about Starlink Mobile going forward.""We definitely intend to build out the terrestrial component," Shotwell said. "So, you will have not only the capacity from the satellites themselves, but you will have a build-out of the hardware and systems necessary to make a true mobile service.""We will eliminate dead zones, leveraging the – basically the satellites in orbit, it will be better during any sort of natural disaster because surprisingly, even though space movies make space look super dangerous, is a pretty quiescent environment."Bernstein analyst Laurent Yoon said the key takeaway wasn't that Starlink is suddenly becoming a direct threat to broadband and wireless incumbents, but rather that SpaceX is still investing toward that outcome, and that the debate could hang over the sector for years, not quarters.PRICE ACTION:In morning trading, shares of T-Mobile and Verizon dropped about 2.5%, AT&T slid about 2%, while Crown Castleand American Towerplunged roughly 8% and 6%, respectively.

IonQ Receives Regulatory Approval to Complete Acquisition of SkyWater Technology

Welcome to the latest edition of "Quantum Leap" where The Fly decodes news and activity in the quantum computing space.QUANTUM SYSTEMS:Horizon Quantum Computing, a subsidiary of Horizon Quantum, and Q.M Technologies entered a strategic collaboration to support the development of quantum systems. Through the collaboration, Horizon Quantum will leverage QM's orchestration platform for quantum control, alongside QM's engineering, to develop embedded calibration technologies for Horizon Quantum's first in-house hardware testbed system Ember-1, a modular superconducting quantum computer.REGULATORY APPROVAL:IonQreceived final regulatory approval to complete its acquisition of SkyWater Technology. Following the close of the transaction, SkyWater will continue to serve a full range of customers as a U.S.-based semiconductor foundry, operating as a wholly owned subsidiary of IonQ under the SkyWater name. The companies anticipate that having secured all required regulatory approvals and satisfied other outstanding closing conditions, they will complete all necessary arrangements to close the transaction on Friday, July 31.VICE PRESIDENT:Infleqtionappointed Joseph Buck as senior vice president of quantum computing systems. Buck joined the company July 27, and will lead development of Sqale, Infleqtion's scalable neutral-atom quantum computer. Buck joined Infleqtion from Lockheed Martin, where he served as senior fellow at the Advanced Technology Center.TANGLELAB:Rigetti Computingannounced that it will partner with HPEand Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center to build the TangleLab supercomputing testbed. The PSC-based testbed, which is being funded by a $5M National Science Foundation grant, will feature a supercomputer powered by a nine-qubit Novera quantum computing system integrated with a classical high-performance computing system. This project builds on Rigetti and HPE's collaboration to commercialize quantum-enabled high-performance computing systems. Construction of TangleLab is expected to begin at PSC's new data center on September 1 with full operations expected in 2027.RESEARCH PACT:Qtrex Quantumlaunched a research collaboration with Northeastern University in Massachusetts, focused on advanced micro-system structures for cryogenic quantum interconnects. Pursuant to the collaboration agreement, Northeastern University has agreed to provide Qtrex with a first option to negotiate a commercial license to Northeastern-owned or jointly developed intellectual property arising directly from the parties' joint research.APPLYING QUANTUM TECHNOLOGY:AT&Thas signed an agreement to expand its use of D-Wave'squantum computing technology and plans to use the technology to address optimization challenges across its network operations. AT&T's initial focus is on layering D-Wave's annealing quantum computing technology into the tools that are already powering AT&T's agentic AI solutions. New quantum capabilities could help increase the benefits of agents in AT&T's network operations. In an early application, AT&T used D-Wave's technology to reduce the processing time for a network optimization workload from approximately one hour to less than 15 seconds. Building on this initial work, AT&T plans to explore using D-Wave's quantum computing technology across a broader set of applications, such as outage detection and response, technician routing, network build planning, and traffic management. Through these applications, AT&T will explore how faster processing could translate into faster and more accurate planning, as AT&T scales its converged fiber and 5G network to meet AI-driven demand. AT&T is also evaluating D-Wave's forthcoming gate-model systems for potential applications in quantum security and quantum communications.ERROR CORRECTION PROGRAM:Quantum X Labsannounced progress on its technical roadmap for its AI-driven quantum error-correction program. The work is focused on reviewing QXL's milestone results and draws on Nvidiaaccelerated computing, the Nvidia CUDA-Q QEC software libraries and, as QXL progresses from simulation-based validation toward hardware-derived syndrome data and future real-time decoding. First, the company executed its deep quantum error correction workflow on an Nvidia GPU in an AWSenvironment and benchmarked its transformer-based QECCT decoder against the classical minimum-weight perfect matching decoder across controlled toric-code noise configurations. QECCT outperformed MWPM in selected simulated regimes. QXL also tested synthetic surface-code configurations modeled on Google'spublic surface-code geometry and experiment structure, spanning multiple code distances. Across these scenarios, the QECCT decoder showed stable logical and bit error rates under varying physical error conditions. These results are intended as an initial step in validating the approach within controlled simulation environments. Future work is expected to focus on extending these evaluations to publicly available experimental datasets and continuing to refine data pipelines and decoder workflows compatible with CUDA-Q QEC frameworks. The broader roadmap also includes QXL's planned work with IQCC to generate hardware-derived syndrome data on superconducting quantum processing hardware. QXL is also reviewing where AI-based pre-decoder workflows using Nvidia Ising, and low-latency optimization can add the greatest value across these stages of QXL's roadmap.C-SUITE APPOINTMENTS:Quantinuumannounced the recent appointments of Robin Schulman as chief legal officer and company secretary, effective July 13, and Rory O'Byrne as chief people officer, effective May 26. Schulman and O'Byrne both report to Quantinuum's president and CEO Rajeeb Hazra. Most recently, Schulman served as chief legal officer and head of corporate affairs at GitLab (GTLC). Most recently, O'Byrne served as chief people officer for Advanced Energy.ANALYST COMMENTARY:Benchmark reinstated coverage of the quantum computing sector, including reinstating coverage of IonQ with a Buy rating and $60 price target, D-Wave Quantum with a Buy rating and $30 price target and Rigetti Computing with a Buy rating and $25 price target. The firm is "bullish" on the quantum computing sector, sees the legitimacy of the technology further building on recent momentum and argues it is not a "winner-takes-all" situation. In these still early days of quantum computing, the best strategy for investors may be to take a portfolio approach to investing in the sector, the analyst contended.CIBC initiated coverage of Xanadu Quantumwith an Outperformer rating and $22 price target. Xanadu is one of the few public pure plays on utility scale photonic quantum computing, the analyst told investors in a research note. The firm said the company has a "catalyst-rich" 2026 through 2029 that can "materially de-risk" its path to commercialization. The bull case is that Xanadu's photonics platform can scale to "fault-tolerant" quantum computing, with speed, networkability, manufacturing compatibility, and PennyLane as differentiators, commented CIBC.