IonQ (IONQ +3.52%) had a busy August. The company signed a memorandum of understanding with CMC Microsystems on Aug. 18 to become a listed cloud access provider for Canada's FABrIC Quantum Computing Sandbox. That was the third such deal in three weeks. In the second-quarter report, IonQ's revenue hit $80.1 million, up 287% year over year.
That's exciting. But while IonQ collects the headlines, the companies that test everyone else's quantum chips barely get mentioned.
FormFactor (FORM -0.52%) sells probe cards and cryogenic test equipment to the semiconductor industry. The company gets plenty of press coverage, but not about its quantum computing projects. Those quantum products are a small part of FormFactor's much larger business, with record Q2 revenue of $258.2 million and a 20% free cash flow margin, which is exactly why the stock rarely appears on quantum screens.
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The cryogenic test bottleneck
Superconducting and silicon-spin qubits, the two chip-based architectures, operate at temperatures near absolute zero, which makes testing slow and expensive. Historically, validating a qubit chip required a full cooldown cycle for a single sample, followed by a system teardown to swap it out. That's a lot of work.
FormFactor sells the equipment that compresses that loop. Its cryogenic product line spans dilution refrigerators (DRs) from sub-10 millikelvin through 77 Kelvin. There are also the IQ3000 high-throughput cryogenic prober, qubit-prescreening cryostats, and a cryogenic test service lab in Boulder, Colorado, for customers who don't want the capital expense of owning their testing systems. The company acquired its dilution refrigerator line from JanisULT in 2022 and described itself as the largest commercial DR supplier in the United States at the time.
The newest addition is Flatiron, a benchtop dilution refrigerator introduced in March 2026. It reaches roughly 30 millikelvin in a horizontal architecture that provides direct access to the sample stage, so researchers can swap samples and reconfigure experiments without stripping vacuum cans and radiation shields.
The cable problem
Then there's the part of scaling that sounds trivial until you try to do it: wiring.
Every qubit you add needs signal lines going from room temperature down to the millikelvin stage. Add enough qubits, and conventional coax simply runs out of room while dumping more heat into a sensitive refrigerator than the cooling unit can remove. Qubit counts hit a wall made of copper cables.
FormFactor's answer came from a March 2025 partnership with Delft Circuits, integrating Delft's specialized Cri/oFlex cabling into its cryogenic systems. Before: 300 signal channels across 12 ports. After: 160 channels per port, up to 1,920 in total. That's the difference between a lab demo and an early-stage production process.
NASDAQ: FORM
Key Data Points
No need to pick a winning quantum technology
FormFactor doesn't need a specific qubit type to win. Superconducting and silicon-spin systems need cryogenic testing, and the industry's shift from one-off lab experiments toward repeatable manufacturing will eventually require automated testing tools.
FormFactor is not alone. It competes with Bluefors and with Quantum Design, which now owns Oxford Instruments NanoScience. It's a strong position, not a monopoly.
There's one real catch for FormFactor investors: The stock currently trades on AI memory demand, not on quantum milestones. As of Aug. 24, FormFactor's stock is up 270% over the past 52 weeks. Anyone buying FormFactor as a quantum play is buying into a semiconductor test company that also holds a strong position in cryogenics.
IonQ is a bet on trapped-ion hardware. FormFactor sells the testing tools that companies on the silicon path need to prove that their chips work.
