Christian Weedbrook, the founder and CEO of Toronto-based Xanadu Quantum Technologies, became a billionaire this week without NVIDIA investing a single dollar in his company. His 46.4 million multiple-voting shares were worth approximately $1.5 billion as of midday Friday, after Xanadu’s stock surged nearly fivefold in six trading sessions. The catalyst was not anything Xanadu did. It was NVIDIA announcing a suite of open-source AI models and a new hardware architecture designed to accelerate quantum computing, which sent the entire sector into a rally that made Xanadu, the only publicly traded pure-play photonic quantum computing company, the most dramatic beneficiary. Xanadu went public on 27 March via a SPAC merger with Crane Harbor Acquisition Corp., listing on both the Nasdaq and the TSX. The stock was already up from its IPO price when NVIDIA’s announcements began landing on 14 April.…