Microsoft's new chip and a quantum leap for computing

Microsoft has unveiled a new chip, Majorana 1, which will potentially enable the creation of quantum computers to solve meaningful, industrial-scale problems in years, not decades.

- Shelley Singh

In a blog post, Chetan Nayak, technical fellow and corporate VP of quantum hardware, Microsoft, said: "Built with a breakthrough class of materials called topoconductor, Majorana 1 marks a transformative leap toward practical quantum computing. Quantum computers promise to transform science and society—but only after they achieve scale that seemed distant and elusive, and their reliability is ensured by quantum error correction. We announce rapid advancements on the path to useful quantum computing. Majorana 1, the world's first Quantum Processing Unit (QPU) powered by Topological Core, designed to scale to a million qubits on a single chip."

It was two decades in development and, as Satya Nadella, CEO Microsoft, said in a post on X: "...we've created an entirely new state of matter, unlocked by a new class of materials, topoconductors, that enable a fundamental leap in computing."

What's quantum computing, and how is it different?