IonQ shares closed at $40.34 on Sept. 17, up 9.5%, after the quantum computing company presented two Best Paper-winning studies at IEEE Quantum Week 2026 in Toronto. Research with Synopsys integrated quantum algorithms into Ansys LS-DYNA and reduced processing times by 5.9% to 14.6% across industrial engineering models containing as many as 35 million data points. Numerical simulations used up to 150 qubits, while the team validated execution on IonQ’s 36-qubit Forte trapped-ion quantum computer. A separate collaboration with Oak Ridge National Laboratory, NVIDIA and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville used generative AI, NVIDIA H200 GPUs and CUDA-Q to keep quantum circuit-generation time near 28 seconds, compared with more than 11 minutes under the previous method. IonQ’s shares remain down about 38% over 12 months, although analysts maintain a Buy consensus and an average $67.75 price target across 15 analysts.