The Current - Xanadu CEO on Canada's quantum future

Episode Date: January 8, 2026

Christian Weedbrook's company Xanadu has announced major breakthroughs in quantum computing and just received $23 billion in funding from the federal government to advance their technology. As part of The Current's series speaking to Canadian business leaders, he joins us to discuss the significance of quantum technology for Canada's economic future and why he wanted to build his company here in Canada. 

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This is a CBC podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is the current podcast. Over the next five years, the Canadian government is investing more than $300 million in quantum computing. It is seen as a way to keep Canada on the cutting edge of new technology and make sure the Canadians benefit from that technology. One of the funding recipients in the first round is Zanadu. This is a company based in Toronto,

has a plan to build the world's first quantum data center on the shores of Lake Ontario. Christian Weedbrook is the CEO of Zanadu, and he's with me in studio as part of our series speaking with Canadian business leaders about this tricky moment that we find ourselves in as a nation. Christian, good morning. Thank you for having me. It's good to have you here. Explain this to somebody who is like 12 years old. What is quantum computing? Yeah, it's, if you go, you can go down a rabbit hall if you're not careful with something like that. I keep a very high level. It's still a computer. So there's a no magic. We're very familiar with computers. The reason why the word quantum is there is it

uses different laws of physics to really speed up computations. So very easy to say, but it's very hard to build, particularly a large-scale quantum computer. The reason why we're all interested in it is a certain problem, very big problems like drug discovery, material design, artificial intelligence, finance, you can really start solving problems that people have always thought are insurmountable. And basically, let's not try to solve these problems. Our quantum computer can now start solving these problems. So things that would normally take thousands or millions of years to solve on a regular computer, it can be done in a fraction of that time. You've told a story about, you know, a problem that would take seven million years

to solve, which then would take how long with quantum computing? For our computer, it took it from seven million years down to two minutes. Two minutes? Two minutes, yes. How is that possible? I mean, And again, it's like people are trying to understand how these things are so much more powerful. Can you explain how that, again, in a way that people would understand how that works? Well, often, you know, the simple way, which is not fully correct, but it's kind of, you often hear it's trying all possibilities at once. A lot of purists in quantum computing or quantum physics don't like that. But there's an element of truth there where you're trying, you know, you're really leveraging things like instead of bits, zero and one, which are, internet, our computers, or rely on and use, you're now using a superposition of zero and one.

So what that means is another way to phrase it in zero and one at the same time. And if you can have two bits at the same time, you can now operate many gates or functions on the two bits instead of one. It's much more detailed than that, but that's a simple way to sort of think about it. One of the things, if people hear about quantum computing, one of the things that they have heard is it's, well, it's just a few years away from being a few years away, from being a few years away. And they think, people keep talking about this, but it's not actually here. How close are we to this thing being viable and useful? And what would you say to people who have heard that line and they think that this is, this is just hype? That's a really good point.

And often we hear it sort of reframed as fusion is always 20 years away. When I hear about that, I often remind people, we still haven't out our first 20 years yet. The research has been going on for decades now, but in terms of companies like Zanadu, we're formed in 2016. It hasn't been 20 years. And so we really haven't reached that point yet as the quantum startup community. We're planting 2029 as the big stake or flag in the ground. And that's when we anticipate to have a large-scale quantum computer that can really make huge inroads in very important industries like pharmaceuticals and material design and quantum chemistry at large. 2029.

2029, that's right. Tell me about your plans for here. I mean, as I said, you want to build a quantum data center on the shores of Lake Ontario. What are you looking to build? What's that vision? The vision is a data center. So it's really, you often see pictures of a large amount of server racks in a kind of nondescript building. Some giant thing that's just like a hanger filled with computers.

Exactly. And you would have hundreds or thousands of these sort of smaller computers or server racks. they're all networked together, meaning that they're connected together. So really, the good thing is you probably won't be able to tell for a quick glance on the difference between a traditional data center and a quantum data center. We have two ways of visions of this. One is building our own data center, as you said, hopefully on sort of the waterfront, and there'll be the world's first and definitely the first anywhere in Canada,

but also selling the individual server racks inside to other data centers that may want to populate their own data centers. So we have those two possibilities. We're very excited about that. And there's two big challenges to achieve that by 2029. One is how do you network these things together? We actually solved that earlier this year. The team published in Nature on effectively how to do that, that problem solved.

The other one over the next couple of years up to 2029 is how do we improve the performance of these small quantum computers or server racks? Should we be concerned about the power of this technology? I want to talk about why this would benefit us. But should we be concerned about some of the things that it could do? If it could make cryptography, for example, that we rely on for banking, for health, for all of the things that we hold near and dear and secret, if it could make that obsolete, are we ready for the power of that kind of technology?

I think we are. What is it going to mean for those things? What is it going to mean for security? Well, if you take security, as you mentioned, there's a lot of quantum post, it's called post quantum cryptography. startups. So they're discovering and working on new codes that a quantum computer kind of puts its hands up in the answer says, we don't know how to solve. So not every math problem is solvable very efficiently by a quantum computer. Just so happens the codes used for our current internet

security are. But there's going to be replacement codes that a quantum computer, at least at this point in time, will not be able to crack. So there's no need to worry about that side of things. Do you have a responsibility to assuage the concerns that people have if suddenly the cybersecurity that we depend on could be obliterated by the thing that you're creating? I think there's also general awareness that discussing like this is important to put on people's radar. I will say that the current thinking is this type of large-scale quantum computer probably won't be delivered or built into the mid-2030s. So companies are already working on solving this problem in the last few years and we'll continue to do so. So we have enough time

to sort of switch over. But you want to be on the cutting edge of this. Do you have a responsibility to make sure that we're all right on the other side of it? I think our responsibility at this point in time is to understand the risks, but push forward with this technology at the same time. Other people are also, their main job is to consider the risks. There's organizations looking at this now. So it's not just a sanitary responsibility. I think it's a community responsibility.

It's definitely true with any technology that's happened over, say, the last 100, 200 years as well. I heard you give a speech in which you said, I mean, those are the concerns that people have. You take a look at the opportunities, that in some ways, the future of Canada and the future of the world is wrapped up in the possible success of this technology in your company. What did you mean by that? Really, from that point of view. We were used to tech hype, but that's the future of the world is dependent on this? Well, I don't remember saying that, not saying I didn't say it, but definitely from a Canadian point of view, we have an opportunity now.

And this goes back to the Champions program that we were a recipient of. I originally came from Australia and been here now for 15 years and I'd hear all these stories kind of similar to Australia where all the best talent had gone to the US and but it was grown here so to speak you know referring back to your quote it really comes back to the fact we don't want to miss out again on things we don't want say Zanudor other talent or startups going to south of the border if quantum plays out the way we think really the quote was related to the economic benefits that if this plays out it's really going to be a fundamentally new industry and new technology, it's really hard to see the limits of that.

Federal government is investing, as I said, $23 million to accelerate the development of this technology. How are you going to ensure, and again, it speaks to what you're just talking about, that those taxpayer dollars and the benefits of those stay here in this country? Well, you know, one thing is it's actually in the contract that we need to be state headquartered here in Canada. So there's a legal responsibility there as well. I think honestly a lot of it just comes back to, you know, in addition to that, the will or the mindset, we want to stay here, we will stay here. There is temptations every week or every month where you're here in the U.S. The certain states are putting more and more money in. Chicago,

I say Illinois is a good example. That Maryland is another one. And so it is tempting all the time, but with this money, it's making sure, you know, the government is also saying this is the first part of the funding as well. It is a matching program to the U.S. DARPA program, QBI. And so it's great to see the Canadian government stepping up, and particularly Minister Solomon as well. But one of the reasons why, I'm not saying your company, but firms, startups would flee south of the borders, because that's where the real money is. You go to Silicon Valley, and sure, $23 million from the federal government, but the real money is south of the border. Don't you need to go there to float an idea like yours? Or can you do that? Can you realistically do that here? I think we can. And I think the default is

that we can't in terms of the thinking. But, you know, this is the first step and stage of money or what will be a larger amount of money. So what's kind of cool is this DARPA program, phase one is $1 million. Phase two is $15. Phase three is 300. That's where it gets very interesting from a funding point of view. What Minister Solomon and the current government is doing is saying phase one is actually, it works out to be $16 million US. So it'll be phase one plus phase two is equal to our phase one. So it's actually from that point of view, the Canadian government is doing more than the US in terms of this. So that's why it gets us very excited. It's a new season of the hit comedy. Welcome to small achievable goals, the show where two friends

get real about menopause and middle age. Today, we're talking hot flashes. Oh my God, I'm so hot all the time. The makeup is sliding on my face. Welcome to Episode 3, Invisibility. People under the age of 25 literally cannot see me. Episode 6, Rainfog. Yesterday, I could not remember the word for tree, so I just called it street broccoli. Oh, cute.

Small, achievable goals. Watch free on CBC Gem. Your C.O has described this company as being fiercely patriotic. What does that mean to you? It means that often you have to go to a different country to realize compared to the folks that were born there how special the country is and the same thing applies to me a lot of people say why have you left Australia and and I'm like because it's definitely much warmer there and I'm like I definitely get the point but I spent a lot of time there and I was

looking for something new and there's a lot of benefits being in North America from a timing funding and many sorts of things but a lot of people when they aren't growing up don't grow up where you're from, see it very differently. And I think I have a unique sort of perspective in seeing how great Canada is because I wasn't from here. And I think that's a natural trait where you hear a lot of people who have left their country. So what are the things that you see here that perhaps people who were born here don't see? Well, I think they see it the same things. Like we don't appreciate it. Yeah. Yeah. I think, you know, from a funding and business point of view, my lens is always through the entrepreneurial point of view that, you know, particularly in the last

10 years. A lot more funding has been available. There's many more venture capitalists that didn't exist when I first came here. So there's less of a need to now go to the US. A lot of great talent. We see the talent in AI. There's probably equally amount of talent in the corner computing space because the government has put a lot of money into universities for the last two decades or more Waterloo is a great example. So all those things are really remarkable. But I also look to, you know, there's nothing, I think, fundamentally special about the US. I I think there's a lot of things that we perhaps like about the U.S. we can do here from an entrepreneurial point of view. You know, you mentioned too that the monies on the, you know,

in the south of the border. That's true from a venture capital point of view, but we've been able to raise $290 million. And a lot of that's been Canadian venture capital. So you've got to stick to your guns and you've got to kind of force it when people say no. You've got to keep at it and keep persisting. So it is possible, but it does make it harder to do something. something great here. But I think we just need more examples of that. And hopefully Zanudu can become one of those examples. Do we have the culture of risk-taking that they have in the United States, do you think? No, that's a really good point. I don't think it's, there is risk-taking obviously happening. It's not zero, but it's not, it's a certain percentage of what happens in the U.S.

You know, we see that with the funding and banks and things of that nature. It's just harder in times of trouble, like the great recession of 0809, it really made sure that Canada wasn't brought down as much as some other countries. So there are benefits, much more conservative. But you don't need too many people. You don't need everyone to be risk takers. You just need more people, and particularly the folks that go to the U.S. that are risk takers. If we can show them, you can stay here. That also helps as well. Can I ask just about you and how you ended up in this? The story that I'd heard was you were in film school. Oh, yes.

And you failed film school. Yes, repeatedly twice, yes. You dropped out of school. You were stocking supermarket shelves in the middle of the night. That's correct, yes. And some other jobs. And how do you end up in this? Yeah, looking back and I don't really know.

I did, to this day, I still love reading biographies. You know, I bought a new one the other day on Mark Twain. I haven't started. It's an amazing book, by the way. Oh, you've read. Yeah, I love the author, too. I think he did Hamilton, and he did one of my favorite one, Titan, John Rockefeller. And so I can't wait to get to that. I've always been inspired by particularly looking back on American stories of, say, the last hundred years. But there must have been something in you that that led you from that to what we've been talking about, creating, like, the computer of the future. That's very weird, yeah. I always wanted to be an entrepreneur, so that was there. But in terms of the physics and building a quantum computer, I tried many things after dropping out of film school

and I just looked back in high school and I was okay at math and so I just went from math and then I love applied math and I love physics and it was really getting more and more applied and I got into physics and then quantum computing

and quantum cryptography were taking off in the mid-2000s and it was really excited so really followed the things I love to do and had some ability in and it just led me to where I am today. You studied at the University of Toronto? I came to that as a postdoc, yeah.

Okay, yeah. And what was it, what did that do in terms of how you thought about this country? Well, when I first arrived here, I love the fact that this country was, I love to had seasons. I'm not a fan of the cold, but I love how you know when the season is there. In Brisbane, it's quite gradual. It's a hard argument to make to somebody who's freezing right now, but continue. Exactly. You know what I've discovered as a side note, it's much, it sounds weird, it's much colder in Brisbane than here.

You know, it only gets to around one degree, but there's no central heating. So you'd have to go to bed with jackets and coats, and you don't, you know, it's a very, you know, going from A to B is tough here. But once you just say here, you can wear T-shirts inside. So I prefer that side of things. You know, it's, when I arrived here, I love the seasons. I also love the fact that how multicultural it was and is. And then the ability is sort of a big city, where I was from is a smaller city. So it had all the elements that I personally love.

And then after I did two postdocs at University of Toronto. After that, they basically say, we've got to kick you out because you're supposed to find a professorship by then somewhere around the world. And I wanted to stay in Toronto. And everything kind of started converging to, well, let's start a company. Do you worry? I mean, you were part of the brain drain out of Australia in some ways, like lured somewhere else. You could have stayed. Folks there might say, why did he leave?

Do you worry? How big of a concern is that for us here? I think it's a big concern. And what Zanado is, it's not our main mission, but hopefully there's. a product of what we're doing, people look and think you can stay here. I don't think there's any reason why you actually need to leave. Federal government is trying to reverse that. They announced this, you know, multi-billion dollar plan to lure people here, right? To kind of flip that around. Exactly. And this is what the Champions program does as well. It's, you know, it's keeping

people that are here, here. But we're hiring folks all the time that are here as well. I think roughly 50% of our hires. We have 260 folks now. Roughly 50% of them are from Canada. So that this money also allows us to retain people that are here and retain us here, but also continue hiring from the local community as well. Let me ask you what's at stake if we don't do that. We have a great tradition in this country of creating things that are monetized by people elsewhere, whether it's research in motion. You think of some of the innovations in AI, for example. Those ideas are being monetized by people who aren't here. Can we really compete in that area, do you think? We can. Maybe I can ask a different question that I don't

really know the answer to is should we be it's a very obvious thing to say yes we should be competing but building a company is tough psychologically tough and so i often wonder sometimes has Canada already solved it it may not have it loses the talent and the companies are built elsewhere but you know peace of mind or happiness how does that rank you know compared to other countries i don't know the answer to it now my peace of mind comes from doing something with meaning and purpose, having some purpose. So that's very tied together. But I often wonder, you know, you often hear about, I've never, I don't have a cottage or anything like that, but you hear about people, you know, Friday afternoon going up to a cottage, whereas in Silicon

Valley, they wouldn't do that. I sometimes wonder what's the best approach. Now, the obvious from an outside looking in, it's like, well, you can become very wealthy, you can build really great products and that. And Canada does have that. But getting back to your point, Do we need to shift that more? I think so, but it's a very good argument if you take the other side. I never thought of it that way. That's really interesting. I mean, part of it I asked is we had Jim Balsalli in here.

You used to be the co-CEO of RIM behind the BlackBerry. And he said that we have to change our mindset in some ways. We don't own our IP, that we create something, somebody else takes it, does what they will with it. And that for the benefit of Canadians, we need to figure out a way to wrap our arms around that. Do you know what I mean? What do you make of what he says? It's true. I think there's definitely, you know, Jim, I've met a few times and he's come to see the great work Zanadu is doing. And he often talks about IP. I think that's something where we're definitely lacking. I can speak from a Zanadu point of view that IP is something we take very seriously and we need to have more of. So in general, I think it's true. And, you know, having future technologies like groundbreaking things like quantum computing and so forth, getting back to my earlier comment, it does do so much good for a country, particularly of course. quantum computing is actually going to change the world and it has the potential to it. It's

fundamentally different way of doing computing and processing information. I also don't believe you can do AGI, which seems the only thing we hear about, without having something different from bits, whether it's quantum computing. So this is going to be key to our artificial intelligence future? We think so. It's still a little bit murky, but I do think so. But I think the key point is what we have now is not enough. So you can keep throwing as much bits and compute power at things, but I don't see how you can have AGI there. Now, there's many smarter people than me that disagree, but I think as an intuitive level,

nature is both binary and analog. So you're leaving stuff on the table if you're really trying to synthesize or create, say, humans or artificial general intelligence. I just don't see how, by not taking all the simulations of things, all those different parameters, how you can actually efficiently simulate things. So whether it's quantum or other things,

biological computing often hear about i do think you need something what is biological so there's really cool companies what they're doing now is they're getting um so i'm not sure if you know i only found this out recently we have neurons in our brain not that part we all know that but there's also neurons in our stomach that's often when you hear about things like my intuition or my gut you know that that's kind of makes a bit more sense now but there's other companies and i think there's neurons in um different places like in your forearm and there's companies that are actually shaving off some skin to get the neurons and putting the neurons, which you can think of, you know, people model computers after the brain. There's a link there.

Now that what they're doing is they're actually taking neurons and trying to program them on chips. And so that's one example of biological computing. And that's kind of analog. You know, you now the brain's analog. It's not operating in bits. And so that's another way. So that's kind of what that is. And that's another example. We're trying to get as much information of the reality we see around us to put it into a computer we may build. You have big dreams for your company and presumably big dreams for this country as well. Take me ahead to the future, five, ten, ten, fifteen years. Paint me a picture of what this country would look like if the investments are made

such that companies like yours are successful, people stay here and we create something larger around that technology. What is this country going to look like? The first thing I think of when you ask that question, is increase in the GDP, which is good for all the citizens if that happens. And then therefore productivity means it's gone up and therefore debt has gone down as well, or the ratio to productivity to debt has increased. So I think that would be marvelous because you don't get too many chances to create a new industry. The second thing that comes to mind is giving potentially

we have 260 people. If we can get to thousands or tens of thousands of people working in Zaner, the amount of jobs we've given people. That to me is so, you know, I think our greatest achievement at the moment is giving jobs to over 200 people. It seems very simple and nothing to do with the technology, but a lot of the folks, we have probably 150 or so PhDs. They would have most likely had to have left their field, their discipline that they've spent years learning and contributing to, including myself.

And so I love the fact that, you know, I'm a big believer in trying to find what you're good out and what you're interested in and making a career out of that. So having more of those people join Canada, so a brain gain from outside of Canada, but then continuing to employ the people here. So an increase in productivity would be amazing. I think that'll be great for everyone, creating more jobs. And then thirdly, which is how you do that, is continuing towards building a large-scale quantum computer and continuing to iterate on that. Because fundamentally, everything that we've discovered is kind of proportional to compute, say, in the last 50, 60, 70 years, imagine we've just been computing now and discovering stuff with our hands tied behind our backs

because current computing is based on traditional laws of physics, Newtonian physics, but the most general laws of physics are quantum physics that we know today. And so now, like, it's wonderful to think how we can actually leverage that. You think you can be the company that helps cut that rope to get our hands out from behind our back? Yeah, for sure. One of those companies, you know, very patriotic. So imagine if we do that here in Canada. I mean, it's crazy to think, but it's happening.

So far, so good. Christian, really good to talk to you about this. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Thank you for your time. Christian Weidbrook is the CEO of Zanadu. It is a quantum computing company in Toronto. I think I almost understand quantum competing now.

Thank you, Christian. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.