IonQ is just days away from hosting its annual investor event, and at least one analyst expects its recent shopping spree to take center stage.

StoneX analyst Gary Mobley anticipates the event will showcase the company's dealmaking muscle. IonQ has been on a buying binge over the past year, snapping up smaller companies not just to expand its scale, but to bolster its technical capabilities as well.

Once a pure-play quantum computing firm, IonQ has expanded into manufacturing components like atomic clocks and networking devices to sell to other companies. CEO Niccolo de Masi frames the move as a way to ensure IonQ becomes "the biggest merchant supplier to the sector."

One of IonQ's most transformative deals was its purchase of chip maker SkyWater Technology, which closed in late July. With a $1.8 billion price tag and $608 million in expected full-year revenue at closing, SkyWater is IonQ's largest acquisition to date.

With the deal complete, IonQ now operates its own foundry, enabling it to offer semiconductor fabrication, chip design, and advanced packaging to clients and industry peers alike. Gaining control of its own supply chain is not only a major strategic priority for IonQ, but it also aligns directly with the goals of the U.S. government, one of the company's closest collaborators.

De Masi has become a regular presence at White House events. Although IonQ was not part of the Commerce Department's $2 billion funding initiative in May, which saw companies trade equity for capital, de Masi emphasized that the company's ties to the government remain strong.

Mobley believes the SkyWater deal, which is "heavily focused on strategic value and short on financial engineering accretion," could pull forward IonQ's road map for a system with 200,000 quantum bits by roughly a year. This timeline aligns with a recent executive order directing the deployment of a fault-tolerant quantum computer at a national laboratory by 2028.

Although the acquisition closed before IonQ's second-quarter earnings call, comprehensive guidance on its impact will wait until the analyst day. Meanwhile, current consensus estimates, including Mobley's, don't factor in SkyWater.

Mobley expects the deal to hit IonQ's existing financial metrics. Beyond absorbing SkyWater's operating expenses-estimated at $93 million this year-he expects the deal to compress combined profit margins.

Additionally, because IonQ was already a major SkyWater customer, revenue from the acquisition won't simply stack on top of IonQ's balance sheet.

Investors and analysts must reduce SkyWater's revenue contribution by roughly 20% to account for internal transactions being canceled out, Mobley wrote. IonQ was on track to pay SkyWater $120 million in 2026, with $80 million to be spent in the second half of the year.

Other recent transactions, such as the $1 billion purchase of Oxford Ionics in September, will likely take a back seat at the Sept. 8 analyst day, though Mobley expects some discussion of IonQ's ability to scale its semiconductor-based control technology.

Nonetheless, the Oxford Ionics deal remains a major technological milestone, giving IonQ access to proprietary tech that allowed it to claim a record in quantum performance last year.

It wouldn't be a surprise to hear some of de Masi's trademark optimism around the company's trajectory, too.

"Our ambition is always to be the Nvidia of quantum," de Masi told Barron's following IonQ's last earnings report-a nod to the comment that crystallized IonQ's ambitions of becoming an ecosystem enabler. "We think we're very much demonstrating we're on track for that."