UPDATE (04/16/2026): This story has been updated to note additional trading halts due to Xanadu’s price activity.
The Canadian Investment Regulatory Organization (CIRO) ordered five trading halts to Xanadu ($XNDU) stock throughout Wednesday and Thursday, after the recently public company saw its share price spike more than 300 percent in a single week.
CIRO said in a statement that the temporary halts were issued due to a “single stock circuit breaker,” which occurs when an individual stock price moves more than 10 percent within a five-minute period during a set time during the trading day. The halt is intended to mitigate volatility and foster investor confidence in a fair market. Trading quickly resumed a few minutes later after each pause.
Xanadu saw its share price briefly spike more than 60 percent on the TSX late Wednesday morning.
The Toronto-based quantum computing company made its public markets debut just last month. It ended its first day on the Toronto Stock Exchange at around $16, but has sat around the $10 mark until a run-up over the last few days, which left it at around $44.50 after markets closed on Thursday. On the Nasdaq, the stock gained a staggering 315 percent over the past week.
The halt came alongside a broader rally in quantum stocks, including D-Wave ($QBTS) and Rigetti ($RGTI), which respectively saw single-day price growth of more than 22 percent and 13 percent on Wednesday; both companies have Canadian roots, with D-Wave having been founded in BC by a team of UBC researchers, and Rigetti being founded by Moose Jaw, Sask.-born entrepreneur Chad Rigetti.
The rush was likely kickstarted by Nvidia, which announced on Monday that it had released a family of open-source quantum AI models, designed to help researchers and companies build useful quantum processors. The chipmaker said it would also release a “cookbook” of quantum computing workflows and training data for developers to use.
Xanadu declined to comment on the rally and trading halt.
Xanadu is both the first Canadian technology company to debut on the TSX since 2021, and the first pure-play photonic quantum computing business to go public.
The global quantum computing market is expected to grow from $1.7 billion USD to more than 11 billion USD over the next four years.
With files from Madison McLauchlan and Josh Scott.
Feature Image courtesy Xanadu.