A new powerful optimization algorithm inspired from colonizing weeds is utilized to solve the well-known quadratic assignment problem (QAP) which is of application in a large number of practical areas such as plant layout, machinery layout and so on. A set of reference numerical problems from QAPLIB is taken in order to evaluate the efficiency of the algorithm compared with the previous ones which had been applied to solve the addressed problem. The results indicate that the algorithm outperforms the competitive ones for a sizable number of the problems as the problems’ dimensions increase.