Source: Xanadu.
If there’s one thing more painful than seeing Canada lose to the Americans in hockey, it’s seeing promising Canadian companies pull up stakes and move south of the border.
The federal government is trying to avoid that fate with Canada’s nascent quantum computing industry.
What happened: Ottawa is launching a Canadian Quantum Champions Program that will direct up to $23 million each to four leading Canadian quantum computing firms: Anyon Systems, Nord Quantique, Photonic, and Xanadu Quantum Technologies.
Why it’s happening: For tech talent and businesses, the lure of the American market, with better salaries, more customers and the world’s most robust startup ecosystem, can be impossible to resist. One B.C.-based pioneer in the quantum space, D-Wave, already made the jump in 2023. Allocating nearly $100 million to the sector is a sign that Ottawa is serious about keeping those companies that remain headquartered in Canada.
It’s likely no accident that the amount of funding in play is a smidge more than what’s on offer from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s own quantum initiative.
Why it matters: Quantum computing could — emphasis on could — one day be a transformational technology, leveraging tiny particles to perform massive calculations that would take thousands of years or longer with traditional computers.
There have been some promising developments in the space recently, like Google’s announcement in October that it had used a quantum computer to run a calculation beyond the capacity of any existing supercomputer.
Yes, but: With practical applications of quantum computers still a distant prospect, this funding is very much a bet on the future — don’t expect to see Canada’s quantum industry become an engine of our economy any time soon.—TS