Microsoft unveils Majorana 2 chip with 1,000× reliability

Microsoft has unveiled a new quantum computing chip, claiming a thousandfold improvement in reliability and accelerating its timeline to build a commercially useful quantum machine by 2029. The announcement, made at the company’s Build conference in San Francisco, centers on the Majorana 2 chip, a successor to a design introduced last year.

The company says the new chip’s quantum bits, or qubits, maintain their quantum state for a mean lifetime of 20 seconds, with some instances lasting up to a minute. This represents a significant increase from the millisecond-scale lifetimes of its predecessor and, according to Microsoft, is roughly a thousand times more reliable. Officials attribute the leap to a key materials change: replacing aluminum with lead as the chip’s superconductor. Lead naturally shields the fragile qubits from external disturbances, but working with the material presented manufacturing challenges that the company says it has now overcome.

Microsoft credits its internal AI research platform, called Discovery, with accelerating the chip’s development. The company stated that AI agents automated measurement processes, analyzed decades of experimental data, and...