Two people with backgrounds in corporate finance and semiconductor manufacturing joined the board of directors at IonQ (NYSE: IONQ) on August 25, 2026. A board of directors is the group of elected members that approves company strategy and holds senior management accountable. IonQ, the College Park, Maryland quantum computing company, appointed Dr. Eric Ball and Timothy Baxter. Chairman and CEO Niccolo de Masi said the company is making the move toward rapid scalability in quantum computing manufacturing.
Ball: four decades in corporate finance
Dr. Eric Ball brings nearly 40 years of senior financial experience at public companies. He has held positions at AT&T, Cisco, and Flextronics. His most substantial stretch came at Oracle, where he served 10 years as Senior Vice President and Treasurer. In that role, he arranged $52 billion in financing and joined M&A teams for more than 100 acquisitions. Ball holds a PhD in Management Economics, has taught economics at three universities, and has written two books.
Baxter: semiconductor manufacturing and consumer tech
Timothy Baxter arrives with a different background. He was Chairman of the SkyWater Technology board until IonQ completed its acquisition of that company. Before that, he held senior management positions at AT&T, Sony, and Samsung, rising to CEO of Samsung North America. He was involved in bringing 5G, HDTV, and Blu-ray to market.
De Masi described both appointments as adding complementary insights to IonQ's board, and framed the company's current focus around what he called "pioneering vertical integration" in quantum computing. Vertical integration, here, means a single company controls the full process from hardware manufacturing to the software that runs on it. IonQ says its systems helped customers including Amazon Web Services, AstraZeneca, and NVIDIA achieve a 20x performance increase over previous quantum solutions. In 2025, IonQ reported reaching 99.99% two-qubit gate fidelity, a measure of how accurately a quantum computer performs operations on pairs of quantum bits, which the company said set a world record.
IonQ's quantum computing services have been available through major cloud providers since 2021. The company operates across North America, Latin America, EMEA, and the Asia-Pacific region.