SAN FRANCISCO -- Microsoft on Tuesday unveiled a new quantum computing chip that it redesigned with the help of AI, saying it now believes it will have commercially useful quantum machines by 2029.
The new target date puts Microsoft on track to have quantum computers the same year as rival IBM, which last month said it plans to spend US$10 billion on quantum machines. It also spun out a company to make quantum chips for others, with backing from U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration.
Microsoft had not previously given a target year for the new chip, saying only that it would be a matter of years, not decades.
Microsoft and IBM are racing against Alphabet’s Google, Amazon and several Chinese efforts to develop quantum systems that could crack problems in medicine, chemistry and cybersecurity that would take conventional computers thousands of years. On Tuesday, Microsoft unveiled a new chip called Majorana 2, a follow-on from its first Majorana chip last year.
AI tools drive materials breakthrough
The biggest change to Microsoft’s internally made chip versus its predecessor is that it uses an entirely new set of materials. While Google, IBM and many others make quantum chips with superconducting wires made out of aluminum, Microsoft’s will be made out of lead, a larger atom.
Microsoft made the switch with the help of AI tools that it developed for use in materials science, and the result was a 1,000-fold improvement in some aspects of Majorana 2’s performance, said Jason Zander, an executive vice president at Microsoft who oversees the firm’s quantum efforts. The breakthrough, Zander said, was figuring out how to use lead, which is water soluble, on a chip without the lead washing away during the manufacturing process.
“The reason why people don’t use it to build chips is it requires an incredibly specialized process to be able to go figure that out. And we figured it out,” Zander said.
Microsoft’s approach to quantum computing relies on quasiparticles known as Majoranas, which had not been proven to exist until Microsoft claimed to have observed them.
Scientific criticism over claims
Its claims have kicked off a flurry of criticism among physicists who say Microsoft has not publicly released enough data to verify its claims. The publication Science last year alerted readers that it was investigating the data used in an earlier Microsoft study from 2020, and some critics of Microsoft’s earlier papers say that the problems with its data and protocols still exist in the research released on Tuesday.
“Microsoft can use as much lead as they like - it is not going to shield them from the basic scientific principle that your results need to be reproducible,” said Henry Legg, a lecturer in quantum physics at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.
Microsoft executives said that trade secrets prevent the company from releasing all of its data but that it has been shared extensively in confidential discussions with the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which is evaluating the feasibility of several different types of quantum systems.
“We’ve done enough of the physics to really have great data,” Zander said of the criticisms of Microsoft’s approach. “Believe me, I would not spend the money on the engineering if I felt like we were still off on the physics.”
(Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; Editing by Matthew Lewis)
