IonQ and Element Six produce foundry-compatible quantum-grade diamond films
On 2025-09-04 IonQ and Element Six (a De Beers Group company) announced production of high-quality, quantum-grade synthetic-diamond films that can be integrated using standard semiconductor-foundry processes. The companies framed the materials advance as enabling mass production of nitrogen-vacancy and silicon-vacancy devices for quantum memories, NV-center magnetometry sensors, and photonic interconnects on IonQ's networking roadmap.
Foundry-compatible quantum-grade diamond is a materials-production milestone with cross-cutting relevance to quantum sensing and networking, though the announcement reports a fabrication capability rather than an independently benchmarked device record, capping it at the sub-domain-relevant level.
If the films scale as described, diamond NV sensors and memories move toward commercial sensor arrays and networked quantum systems, strengthening IonQ's positioning across compute, networking, and sensing simultaneously.