In brief
- Microsoft said its new Majorana 2 quantum chip is 1,000 times more reliable than its previous generation and could help bring scalable quantum computing by 2029.
- The company said AI tools played a key role in accelerating research, materials discovery, and manufacturing improvements behind the chip.
- The announcement adds to the growing concerns over when quantum computers could become powerful enough to threaten modern cryptography.
Artificial intelligence is helping accelerate quantum computing breakthroughs as researchers race to build machines that could one day challenge the cryptography securing Bitcoin and much of the modern internet.
During its annual Build conference on Tuesday, Microsoft unveiled Majorana 2, a new topological quantum chip that it says is 1,000 times more reliable than its predecessor. Microsoft said the chip achieves average qubit lifetimes of 20 seconds, with some lasting as long as one minute.
In a blog post following the announcement, Microsoft said its Microsoft Discovery platform and agentic AI tools helped researchers analyze decades of quantum research, identify promising materials, automate measurements, optimize fabrication processes, and uncover manufacturing flaws that improved qubit reliability.
“By applying recent advances in agentic AI specially designed to speed the scientific process and accelerate collaboration, Microsoft’s quantum team is overcoming key barriers in reliability, speed, and size that have limited the application of quantum computing to real-life scenarios,” Microsoft wrote.
Majorana 2 builds on Microsoft’s Majorana 1 chip by replacing its aluminum-based topological superconductor with a lead-based design that better protects qubits from interference, a change Microsoft said led to substantial improvements in reliability and speed. Coupled with its compact qubit design, the company said, it’s bringing scalable quantum computing closer to reality—something it now expects to achieve by 2029.
“We need to make improvements each year that will get us closer to delivering a computer that we believe will have massive commercial and societal value,” Microsoft Technical Fellow Chetan Nayak said in a statement. “We’ve got to keep marching to that roadmap to accomplish that, but where are we relative to last year? We’re 1,000 times better.”
To help researchers across multiple countries and disciplines navigate the project’s growing body of knowledge, Microsoft’s quantum team developed an AI agent that organizes, analyzes, and surfaces information from across the program.
“Using agentic AI to automate the measurements was a game-changer,” said Zulfi Alam, corporate vice president for quantum at Microsoft. “It goes through some math and starts saying, ‘Hey, where do I find the lowest point where everything sort of works?’ And it can do all these voltage adjustments in parallel, which a human cannot do. The way our minds work, we are more linear.”
The announcement comes amid ongoing concern over “Q-Day,” the point at which a quantum computer becomes powerful enough to break widely used public-key cryptography, allowing attackers to derive private keys from exposed public keys and steal funds.
Bitcoin is widely expected to be one of the biggest targets when that happens, with some $461 billion worth of BTC said to be at risk due to exposed public keys. It’s a potential future that developers are angling to resolve ahead of it becoming reality.
“What a quantum computer could do, and this is what’s relevant to Bitcoin, is forge the digital signatures Bitcoin uses today,” Justin Thaler, research partner at Andreessen Horowitz and associate professor at Georgetown University, previously told Decrypt. “Someone with a quantum computer could authorize a transaction taking all the Bitcoin out of your accounts, or, however you want to think of it, when you did not authorize it. That’s the worry.”
Microsoft is not alone in reporting rapid progress. In October, Google’s Willow chip demonstrated significant reductions in quantum error rates, while more recent research out of Caltech suggested that breaking elliptic-curve cryptography may require fewer quantum resources than previously estimated.
Google projected that Q-Day could arrive by 2032, while other researchers have said it could happen by 2030.
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