Nvidia's Open-Source Quantum AI Models Announced, Boosting Xanadu Shares 250%

5 billion within five days, according to Bloomberg, which cited market data and regulatory filings.

Xanadu's valuation topped $16 billion, positioning it as one of Canada’s most valuable publicly traded tech companies. Companies such as IonQ and Rigetti also benefited from Nvidia’s open-sourcing announcement. The quantum computing industry is currently valued at about $1 billion and has the potential to become a $198 billion market by 2040, according to Jefferies analyst Kevin Garrigan.

Xanadu, founded in 2016 by Weedbrook, is working to build the first quantum data center by 2030. The company uses light in photonic quantum computers to perform computations at room temperature. While traditional computing uses binary bits like 0 or 1 to represent data, quantum computing uses qubits, which can exist as both 0 and 1 simultaneously.

Xanadu went public in March after merging with Crane Harbor Acquisition Corp. Prior to its IPO last month, Xanadu secured $287 million in government financial aid for its data center plans. Weedbrook, an Australian native and film school dropout, flunked out of his first year of film school twice.

At 23, he worked part-time at a video store and filmed television commercials and short films posted to YouTube in between early morning shifts stocking groceries. He took four years of odd jobs before returning to university to study math. “I’d exhausted every other option,” Weedbrook said to the Globe and Mail.

“I thought, ‘I’ll just go back to something I was okay in—math. ’” Weedbrook earned his quantum information theory PhD at the University of Queensland and studied as a postdoctoral fellow at MIT. In 2014, Weedbrook founded Cipher Q, a quantum security company.

Weedbrook launched Xanadu two years after founding Cipher Q in Toronto. Weedbrook’s first chip for Xanadu failed, and he faced eviction three times during Xanadu’s early days. Xanadu secured assistance from the University of Toronto’s Creative Destruction Lab incubator in its early days.

Xanadu demonstrated quantum advantage by performing a task in milliseconds compared with a supercomputer that would have taken 9,000 years. Xanadu released its open-source software library PennyLane in 2018, with the name inspired by Weedbrook’s affinity for the Beatles. PennyLane reached 35,000 active users as of March filings.

“You can guarantee we’re working the hardest out of all quantum computer developers,” Weedbrook said to the Globe and Mail. Fortune convened 'The Smartest People We Know' in 2001. Fortune Brainstorm Tech will return to Aspen from June 8–10 to mark 25 years of Brainstorm.

@FortuneMagazine reported these developments, including details on Weedbrook's background and Xanadu's milestones.