Toronto-based quantum computing company Xanadu claims that it has figured out how to network quantum computers together, one of the key challenges facing the industry.
Xanadu introduced its new photonic quantum computer Aurora today. Aurora, which builds on Xanadu’s previous X8 and Borealis systems, consists of four modular and independent server racks that are photonically interconnected and networked together. The new 12-qubit machine is made up of 35 photonic chips and a combined 13 kilometres of fibre optics that all operate at room temperature.
According to Xanadu, this breakthrough result, which was published in the peer-reviewed research journal Nature, “marks a pivotal milestone towards realizing utility-scale quantum computing” and constructing a quantum computer capable of solving real-world problems.
“Xanadu has now solved scalability.”
Christian Weedbrook
Xanadu
“The two big challenges remaining for the industry are the improved performance of the quantum computer (error correction and fault tolerance) and scalability (networking),” Xanadu founder and CEO Christian Weedbrook said in a statement. “Xanadu has now solved scalability.”
Weedbrook claimed that in principle, Aurora could be scaled up to thousands of server racks and millions of qubits today, which would help the company realize its ultimate goal of building a quantum data centre. But instead of doing that, the CEO said Xanadu plans to focus on performance in reducing loss and being fault tolerant first as it eyes “the next major hurdle towards fault-tolerant quantum computing: optical loss.”
Last year, Weedbrook told The BetaKit Podcast that Xanadu was planning to raise $100 million to $200 million USD in late 2024 or early 2025 and hoping to secure this amount entirely from Canadian investors. He indicated that Xanadu would use this funding largely to advance its quantum computing hardware, which is challenging and expensive to develop.
At the time, Weedbrook said that Xanadu aimed to establish a quantum data centre in 2029, a target he expects will also require another even larger financing before then.
Xanadu aims “to build quantum computers that are useful and available to people everywhere.” Founded by Weedbrook in 2016, Xanadu is working to use photons, or particles of light, to perform exceptionally fast and complex computations at room temperature quicker than traditional computers.
According to Xanadu, the now 190-plus-person company’s photonics-based approach to quantum computing offers a few advantages, including the ability to leverage modern chip manufacturing facilities, the application of optical components developed by the existing telecommunications industry, and the use of fibre optics to network photonic chips together.
Xanadu has raised $275 million USD in total funding to date from a group of Canadian investors that includes BDC Capital, Georgian Partners, Golden Ventures, OMERS Ventures, Radical Ventures, and Real Ventures, and foreign backers like Alumni Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, Capricorn, Forward Ventures, Pegasus Tech Ventures, Porsche Automobil Holding SE, Tiger Global, and Tim Draper.
This figure includes a $100-million USD, Georgian-led Series C round from late 2022 at a $1-billion USD valuation. According to The Globe and Mail, Silicon Valley Bank provided about $10 million USD in venture debt as part of that financing.
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That round came shortly after Xanadu hit an elusive milestone in the quantum race when its Borealis quantum computer achieved “quantum advantage,” delivering a result beyond the practical reach of a conventional computer system, as outlined in Nature.
In its Series C announcement, Xanadu indicated that the company’s next goal was to build a fault-tolerant and error-corrected quantum computer capable of scaling up to one million qubits, the level at which it said useful applications could be accessed.
Shortly afterwards, Xanadu secured an additional $30 million USD from the Government of Canada’s Strategic Innovation Fund to fuel its quantum computing development and commercialization efforts.
“We look at this as being at the early days of the Internet, early days of the [personal computer] revolution,” Weedbrook told The BetaKit Podcast last year. “It’s that transformative.”
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Amid the artificial intelligence (AI) boom, Weedbrook has pitched quantum as the solution to rising data centre costs. Last year, Weedbrook argued on The BetaKit Podcast, “Quantum will have its AI moment in terms of the buzz that we see now in generative AI.”
“It’s probably one of the next key technologies that will have a lot of hype around it, some good, some bad, like any cycle of hype,” Weedbrook added.
In late 2024, investor interest in quantum computing surged, benefitting publicly traded firms in the space. This includes Canadian-founded and now United States-based D-Wave and American players like IonQ and Rigetti Computing.
This rise has been fuelled partly by recent progress announcements from quantum developers like Google. Though quantum stocks fell earlier this month after Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang expressed a more pessimistic outlook on the sector—one that D-Wave CEO Alan Baratz contested—they continue to trade far above their pre-November 2024 prices.
Feature image courtesy Xanadu.