Seize the quantum future – or let the U.S. own it. Which way, Canada?

Christian Weedbrook is co-founder and chief executive officer of Xanadu Quantum Technologies Ltd.

In 2016, I was a little-known founder, an Australian transplant fresh out of the University of Toronto as a postdoctoral research fellow, trying to convince any investor who would listen that quantum computing — a technology that wasn’t yet a household name — was worth a bet. Over the years, I stopped counting the investor “nos” after hearing hundreds of them.

A handful of early-stage investors and some public funding eventually gave me the capital I needed to start Xanadu Quantum Technologies Ltd. Over a decade later, the technology that many other people struggled to understand is now impossible to ignore. Quantum is now a pillar of Canada’s G7 agenda, a fixture of the federal defence strategy and the basis of a handful of Canadian companies competing on the world stage. No doubt we’ll soon have a moment, as with ChatGPT and artificial intelligence, when quantum will shatter expectations about what practical things it can do.

Although I eventually succeeded, every rejection had been a blow. I had so little money in the early days that I was threatened with eviction from my home three times. Xanadu’s first chip did not work. I think about those days sometimes and how much potential can be lost when an audacious idea isn’t given space to grow. My journey would have been easier if the broader public had grasped quantum computing, even at a high level.

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Ottawa’s AI Strategy is finally here, and one commitment that caught my eye was the focus on AI literacy. It gives every Canadian free AI training amid the disruptive threat artificial intelligence poses to the work force.

Increasing AI literacy is the right instinct. And it’s one we should adopt for quantum computing, too, to prepare our economy for the next phase of technological progress.

Quantum computers will be capable of solving, in minutes, problems that would take today’s computers millions of years. They’ll potentially discover new medicines in months instead of years and fuel the next generation of batteries for electric vehicles, thanks to their ability to simulate how molecules behave in a way that today’s computers cannot.

Quantum will also upend national security: Canada’s own cryptography agency has said that quantum computers could break current encryption standards as soon as the 2030s. Preparing for this requires a joint effort between the public and private sectors to replace the encryption protecting our sensitive data, and we’ll need more than just quantum specialists to lead this change.

Right now, the future of quantum computing is being written south of the border. This month alone, the U.S. government committed US$2-billion to nine quantum firms for equity stakes.

Canada, by contrast, has committed $334-million over five years. If the United States owns most of the companies and infrastructure that underpins quantum, we’d rely on a foreign power to protect our financial systems, health care records and national security.

In many respects, it’s challenging to outspend the U.S., but nations can still become world leaders in society-defining inventions if the people within them can push the boundaries of emerging tools.

Canada’s past tech literacy programs provide a playbook for quantum literacy. From 2017 to 2024, a federal program called CanCode funded non-profits that trained teachers and students in coding and AI. It reached more than 7.6 million students and trained over 400,000 teachers, and the share of teachers who built coding into their classrooms rose from 19 per cent to 29 per cent. Forty-four per cent said the program had a major influence on whether their students intended to pursue STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) at all. CanCode was renewed in the spring of 2025.

The AI strategy’s literacy plan aims to reach a million postsecondary students and provide AI learning kits to 3,000 educators. The infrastructure to upskill Canadians in AI is being built on a national scale, and these resources can also explain how quantum could work alongside AI.

There is a reason to combine quantum literacy and AI literacy: The technologies will converge. The data centres being built to power Canada’s AI ambitions will eventually need to integrate quantum, as classical computing fails to keep pace with AI’s incessant hunger for energy. The companies that own that infrastructure here, such as BCE Inc. and Telus Corp., are already investing in exactly this. AI and quantum are part of the same race.

The AI strategy calls for boosting AI adoption in businesses to 50 per cent. Quantum isn’t yet powerful enough for everyday business use, but it can be part of that initiative over the next five years. Investing in domestic AI compute capacity is part of the strategy, and companies such as Telus are beginning experimentation with hybrid classical-quantum infrastructure; companies could provide cloud access to quantum in an Amazon.com-Inc.-like model that rents time to businesses to run small pilots seeking potential use cases.

As the feds train educators on AI, quantum experts can similarly educate businesses on how quantum computers can perform calculations that model complex systems for drug discovery and materials design – even if quantum computers still need to be more powerful. This approach exposes people outside of STEM to quantum. So, as it develops over time, people will be prepared to find real-world use cases, such as optimizing financial portfolios.

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There’s a misconception that quantum is too complex for non-physicists. But quantum could be a first-year elective open to any undergraduate, the way introductory computer science is open to arts and business students. Linguists laid the groundwork for natural language processing, which was foundational for AI. Today, artists, writers and humanities scholars are rightfully challenging how AI gets built and who benefits, and they’re asking tough questions about bias and privacy. They could have been a bigger part of building AI from the start.

Quantum benefits from the same breadth of perspective and scrutiny, which means quantum literacy can’t live only in physics departments. AI learning kits that educators will use should include key concepts versus equations, reinforcing why quantum matters and the mysteries that are waiting to be uncovered. These investments will be worth the effort when quantum has its breakthrough moment and captures the zeitgeist the way AI has.

There’s a concept in quantum computing called superposition, in which a particle can be in two states at once until the moment it’s observed, before it collapses into one. Canada is in its own kind of superposition. We can wait for another country with deeper pockets to define one of the biggest technological advances of our time, or we can use our ingenuity to lead the world. Both futures still exist, but we don’t get to stay between two states forever. Which Canada do we want to collapse into?

Prosperity’s Path