Building Canada’s Quantum Computing Future

By Domenic Del Vecchio

If you've followed quantum computing over the past decade, you've witnessed an industry caught in a paradox. While quantum systems promise exponential computational advantages, potentially revolutionizing everything from drug discovery to climate modeling, they still remain frustratingly impractical for real-world use. The problem isn't just the physical hardware of it all; it's the errors.

Quantum computers are notoriously fragile. Minor vibrations, temperature fluctuations, or electromagnetic noise cause qubits to lose their quantum state. To combat this, the industry has pursued a brute-force approach: quantum error correction schemes that require hundreds or even thousands of physical qubits to create a single reliable "logical" qubit. This makes systems enormous, hugely energy-intensive, and incredibly capital-intensive to develop and manufacture - simply put, impractical without massive market economies of scale (which are still years away).

The quantum computing market is projected to reach $20.2 billion by 2030, with investment surging to over $1.25 billion in Q1 2025 alone. Yet despite this massive capital influx, the path to commercial viability has remained elusive. Most systems would still need tens of thousands of qubits to provide the logical qubit capacity to perform market-ready calculations, which hardly justifies their operational costs.

Enter Nord Quantique, a global leader in quantum computing based in Sherbrooke, Quebec, tackling quantum computing's most fundamental barrier: achieving fault-tolerant error correction without the proportional need for capital-intensive hardware – a massive unlock that has the team at Panache excited about where this can position Canada in the future global quantum market.

The Quantum Computing Inflection Point

We're at a critical juncture. After years of growing qubits, building a capital-intensive race to nowhere, the industry has now pivoted to stabilizing qubits, focusing on quality over quantity. McKinsey and others identified 2024 as this pivotal shift, signaling readiness for mission-critical enterprise adoption with the appropriate fault-tolerant architecture.

Several forces are creating an unprecedented opportunity:

Geopolitical quantum competition is intensifying. Governments globally have committed over $35 billion to national quantum programs. The U.S., EU, China, and Canada are racing to achieve quantum advantage, with quantum capabilities increasingly viewed as essential to national security.

The cryptographic threat is becoming real. Many predict that we are now only a few years away from breaking today's RSA encryption standards, which secure everything from financial transactions to government communications. Google has still predicted that the physical bar to decrypting today’s RSA encryption has shrunk from several million qubits to under one million due to scientific breakthroughs. The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has already standardized post-quantum cryptography protocols. In response, many large data stewards and foreign government defense agencies are already adopting these new standards and investing in quantum infrastructure to fight against so-called “harvest now, decrypt later” attacks on sovereign data globally (source).   

Error correction has emerged as the defining challenge. IBM is targeting 100,000-qubit systems by 2033, while Google recently unveiled its Willow chip with improved error correction. However, conventional approaches still require up to 1,000 physical qubits per logical qubit—making scalable quantum computing incredibly expensive and difficult.

Enter the Hardware-Efficient Architecture

Nord Quantique is attempting to fundamentally reimage the path to quantum error correction and quantum scalability, using bosonic encoding alongside proprietary Tesseract code to enable a 1:1 ratio between physical qubits and logical qubits-a feat no other quantum computing company has achieved (read their technical paper to learn more). Instead of requiring hundreds of physical qubits to create one reliable logical qubit, Nord Quantique encodes quantum information directly into the quantum states of light within superconducting cavities, building error resilience into each individual qubit.

In May 2025, Nord Quantique demonstrated multimode bosonic qubit encoding, achieving stable quantum information across 32 error correction cycles with no measurable decay. This marks the first implementation of this approach, which protects against multiple error types simultaneously.

The implications are profound:

• Dramatically smaller systems: A 1,000-logical-qubit quantum computer will occupy approximately 20 square meters, suitable for standard data centers, not warehouse-scale facilities as some other publicly-traded competitors operate.

  
  

• Massive energy efficiency: Their architecture could solve RSA-830 cryptographic algorithms in one hour using just 120 kWh, compared to classical computing requiring nine days and 280,000 kWh, an energy reduction of over 99%.

  
  

• Faster path to commercial viability: Nord Quantique can reach fault-tolerant systems (100+ logical qubits) by 2029, potentially years ahead of competitors.

Why Nord Quantique is Uniquely Positioned to Win

Led by their innovative approach and recent scientific breakthroughs, Nord Quantique is positioned, among only a handful of suitable competitors, to compete with the likes of Google, IBM, Psi Quantum, and others, in creating the most cost-efficient and scalable quantum computing infrastructure - a potential multi-billion dollar prize awarded by the public and private markets. 

1. World-Class Team from a Global Quantum Research Epicenter

Nord Quantique emerged from the Institut Quantique at Université de Sherbrooke, one of the world's premier quantum research institutions. Their advisor, Alexandre Blais, co-invented circuit quantum electrodynamics, the foundational approach used by many top quantum programs like IBM, Google, and Rigetti. 

Assembling a world-class scientific team led by CEO Julien Camirand Lemyre and CBO Philippe St-Jean, Nord Quantique not only boasts global scientific prowess but also an impressive execution ability-having delivered on nearly 100% of its scientific roadmap milestones it laid out at inception, an execution rate rare and unmatched in deep-tech.

2. Breakthrough Technology with Validated Scientific Proof Points

Nord Quantique is the first company globally to realize a logical qubit from a single physical qubit (1:1 ratio). Their multimode Tesseract code demonstration represents a genuine first in applied physics, addressing quantum computing's core limitations through hardware efficiency and comprehensive error protection.

Yvonne Gao, Assistant Professor at the National University of Singapore, notes: "Their approach of encoding logical qubits in multimode Tesseract states is a very effective method of addressing error correction... They are an important step forward on the industry's journey toward utility-scale quantum computing." 

This provides a huge advantage in more quickly realizing commercial-scale quantum computing in the near term and a possible first-mover advantage on winning large procurement or R&D contracts. 

3. Major Strategic Commercial and Technical Validation

Nord Quantique was just recently approved for Phase B of DARPA's Quantum Benchmarking Initiative-often considered by industry experts as "the gold standard" of early technical validation. Beyond technical validation, this milestone provides a first multi-million dollar commercial purchase agreement and positions Nord Quantique as a vetted leader in supplying quantum infrastructure for mission-critical government and defense applications moving forward.

4. Canada’s Quantum Ecosystem Advantage

Nord Quantique has access to full-control fabrication facilities, via the Institut Quantique in Sherbrooke and its para-governmental funding, that most quantum startups must either build from scratch (requiring massive capital) or outsource (limiting iteration speed). This infrastructure advantage creates a further competitive moat around execution speed and capital efficiency in scaling fault-tolerant quantum computing infrastructure.

The Hardware-Efficient Quantum Revolution

Competition in the quantum computing market is intensifying -superconducting qubits (IBM, Google, Rigetti), trapped ions (IonQ, Quantinuum), and photonics (PsiQuantum, Xanadu). These companies have collectively raised billions and achieved impressive milestones, but they all face the same fundamental challenge: conventional error correction requiring massive hardware overhead.

Nord Quantique's 1:1 physical-to-logical qubit ratio represents a fundamentally different architectural approach. While competitors build larger systems to brute-force error correction, Nord Quantique builds smarter qubits that correct errors more efficiently-creating advantages in capital efficiency, time to market, and commercial viability.

In a world increasingly dependent on computational capabilities-from climate modeling to pharmaceutical discovery to artificial intelligence-quantum computing isn't a luxury anymore; it is infrastructure critical to advancing the frontiers of science and protecting data sovereignty across nations. But that infrastructure needs to be practically deployable, not just theoretically possible.

Nord Quantique represents something larger than just another quantum computing company-they're building the hardware foundation that will cross the chasm into making fault-tolerant quantum computing commerciable. 

The industry has spent the past decade proving quantum computers can work in principle. The next decade will determine which architectural approaches can scale economically and crown the early winners in this market. And Nord Quantique is leading the charge right from our own backyard.

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Nord Quantique is a quantum computing company developing fault-tolerant quantum systems using bosonic error correction with multimode encoding. Founded in 2020 in Sherbrooke, Québec, the company is pioneering hardware-efficient approaches to quantum computing.

Nord Quantique just announced its admission into Phase B of DARPA’s Quantum Benchmarking Initiative (QBI) (learn more).