Microsoft used its annual Build conference in San Francisco this month to showcase a new quantum computing chip it says is 1,000 times more reliable than its predecessor released just last year.
The chip, called Majorana 2, is the latest step in Microsoft’s long-running effort to build a practical quantum computer. Its qubits, the quantum equivalent of the bits inside a regular computer, now have an average lifetime of 20 seconds, with some lasting as long as one minute. That may not sound impressive, but consider this: other common approaches in the industry measure qubit lifetimes in microseconds, which are millionths of a second.
The qubit lifetime matters because quantum computers need their qubits to hold a stable state long enough to complete a calculation. The longer they last, the more complex the problem a machine can reliably solve.
In the new chip, researchers swapped some of the materials used to create the qubits. In particular, the team used lead instead of aluminium as a superconductor, a material that transmits electricity without resistance at very low temperatures. Lead provides a substantially larger superconducting gap than aluminium, which makes it harder for environmental disturbances to kick the system into an error state.
Microsoft also credits artificial intelligence for helping crack the problem. The company says the new chip was developed with the help of Microsoft Discovery, an agentic AI platform designed to accelerate scientific research. The AI helped engineers identify the right combination of materials for the improved design far faster than traditional laboratory methods would allow.
The team now says it is on a path to achieve a scalable quantum computer that is commercially valuable by 2029, cutting its earlier target date in half.
Not everyone in the scientific community is ready to celebrate just yet. Several prominent physicists responded to the announcement within hours, saying the new data does not resolve their fundamental objections about whether Microsoft has truly built the type of qubit it claims. The research has also not yet gone through formal peer review.
Still, for a technology that has promised much and delivered slowly, a 1,000-fold jump in stability in a single year is the kind of progress that keeps the field moving forward.
