Microsoft has announced its latest quantum chip Majorana 2, which the firm says is 1,000 times more reliable than its predecessor.
Quantum computers rely on qubits rather than the bits used in traditional computing, which allow them to process problems exponentially faster. Microsoft’s approach to quantum computing relies on topological qubits, which the firm claims are more stable than qubits used in competing quantum systems.
Whereas in Majorana 1 the qubits were stable for just a few milliseconds at a time, Microsoft claims it has achieved a mean qubit lifetime of 20 seconds in Majorana 2. The firm added that it has recorded qubits lasting up to one minute in some instances.
The advancement has led Microsoft to halve its quantum timeline, with the tech giant now expecting to build a scalable and commercially viable quantum computer by 2029.
Majorana 2 contains lead nanowires rather than the aluminium components found in its predecessor, which Microsoft said helps to shield it against minute environmental disturbances that disrupt qubits such as electromagnetic radiation, temperature changes, or even microscopic vibrations.
These claims have not been published in a reputable journal, and Henry Legg, a physicist at the University of St. Andrews, told Scientific American the data Microsoft provided “would never make it through peer review”.
In 2021, the company had to retract a paper on quantum computing in the journal Nature after experts noted potential problems with its data collection.
Chetan Nayak, technical fellow at Microsoft, said: “We need to make improvements each year that will get us closer to delivering a computer that we believe will have massive commercial and societal value”.
“We’ve got to keep marching to that roadmap to accomplish that, but where are we relative to last year? We’re 1,000 times better.”
Microsoft says it used generative AI to help design the improved chip.
Alongside the chip, the firm announced the general availability of Microsoft Discovery, a platform through which organisations can deploy AI agents to work in tandem on a scientific or engineering problem.
“The agents can really accelerate things as much or as little as you want,” Nayak added. “It can be as little as pulling information together and summarizing it, or it can go further down the road of synthesizing it more or generating an interesting hypothesis. I think that’s extremely powerful right now.”
Several big tech firms are competing with Microsoft to build scalable quantum systems. Google uses superconducting qubits for its Willow chip, which it made available to researchers at King’s College London at the end of May. It uses superconducting qubits rather than topological qubits, an approach that IBM is also following in its plans to achieve fault-tolerant quantum computing by 2029.
