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Microsoft said last year it had made a major breakthrough in quantum computing with Majorana 1, the company's first quantum processor. While physicists were immediately skeptical of Microsoft's claims, the software giant today announced Majorana 2, the next generation of its topological quantum chip.

Microsoft's next-generation quantum chip reduces time to useful quantum computing

Microsoft's Majorana 2 chip uses a new stack of materials that promises quantum computing much sooner.

Majorana 2 contains qubits, a unit of information in quantum computing similar to the binary bits that computers use today, which are 1,000 times more reliable, according to Microsoft. This is an important step that helps make quantum computing more reliable, through the use of a new hardware stack and with the help of agentic AI from Microsoft Discovery.

“To create Majorana 2, the Microsoft Quantum team enhanced the material stack from Majorana 1 to create a

stable topological phase,” says Chetan Nayak, a technical researcher at Microsoft and corporate vice president of quantum hardware. "Majorana 2 replaces Majorana 1's superconductor, aluminum, with lead, and also updates the active region of the semiconductor with a combination of indium arsenide and indium arsenide antimonide."

Improved materials mean better qubit performance, according to Microsoft. “In aluminum-based Majorana 1, the lifetime of qubits was between one and 12 milliseconds, while in Majorana 2, the lifetime exceeded 20 seconds, representing a more than 1,000-fold improvement in stability,” says Nayak. The lifespan of some qubits now exceeds a minute, enough to convince Microsoft that it has made enough significant progress to promise useful quantum computing much sooner.

“Based on this rapid progress, we are accelerating our roadmap to a scalable and practical quantum computer,” says Nayak. “We have cut our timeline in half and are now aiming to achieve this goal by 2029.” Microsoft is working to build a prototype fault-tolerant quantum computer based on topological qubits, with the aim of solving some of the world's most difficult problems.

Microsoft today offers its customers Discovery, the platform that helped improve its Majorana chips. Microsoft Discovery is designed to help apply agent-based workflows to research and development programs. A local app version of Microsoft Discovery is now available on GitHub, and researchers can use a GitHub Copilot account to access it.