Microsoft this week unveiled a quantum computing “breakthrough”, promising a large-scale rollout of the technology just around the corner.
The tech giant has been working on quantum computing technologies for nearly two decades, which culminated on Wednesday when it announced ‘Majorana 1’, a new quantum chip it says shows a path to developing a large-scale quantum computer in years rather than decades.
Further research looks likely to unleash huge amounts of compute power, which could help solve longstanding problems in everything from drug discovery to materials design.
Companies around the world — including many European startups like France’s Pasqal and Finland’s IQM Quantum Computers, are racing to develop a fully-fledged quantum computer — each using different methods. Now, it seems they’ll be counting one more major competitor in the race.
Sifted dug into the details of Microsoft’s quantum breakthrough to find out what it means for the sector at large.
What did Microsoft do?
Ordinary computers store information in the form of bits (binary digits), which present as either a “zero” or “one”. Quantum computers are built with qubits, which can be both zero and one simultaneously, allowing them to perform complex calculations quickly. The biggest hurdle in the quest for practical quantum computing is qubit’s unstable nature.
So far, researchers have only been able to stabilise them for fractions of a second, meaning the information they hold is quickly lost. In December, Google said it had managed to get a qubit to hold its quantum state for one ten thousandth of a second, a feat considered a breakthrough by many.
Qubits can be created with different types of particles: IBM and Google use electrons, known as superconducting qubits, while Pasqal focuses on neutral atoms and others like Paris-based Quandela use photons (particles of light).
In the early 2000s, Microsoft bet on a theoretical quantum particle called Majorana fermions to build its qubits, which physicists think could be more resistant to errors than other methods.
On Wednesday the Big Tech company announced it had developed a chip powered by a new state of matter called a ‘topoconductor’ — different from solids, liquids and gases — which it says provides the right conditions for Majorana particles to exist and be used in quantum computing.
Eventually, Microsoft thinks they could be used to create qubits that remain stable for longer periods of time and scale its quantum processor to 1m qubits — seen as the benchmark for practical applications — by the end of the decade.
“This was a research pathway that was still theoretical but has now turned out to be a genuine way to build a quantum computer,” Olivier Tonneau, partner at quantum-focused VC firm Quantonation, tells Sifted.
What does this mean for European startups?
While the announcement establishes topological qubits as a new contender in quantum hardware, some scientists are sceptical.
Scientific journal Nature said that Microsoft has only published “intermediary results” for the experiment, which don’t prove the existence of topological qubits.
Microsoft’s promise to scale to 1m qubits within years should also be taken with a pinch of salt, some say.
“This is the demonstration of some basic core protocols to build topological qubits, but there’s a lot of things you still have to prove to build quantum computers using that protocol at scale,” says Rajeeb Hazra, the CEO of UK quantum computing company Quantinuum. “Some of them are science problems, some of them are engineering problems.”
Quantonation’s Tonneau says that Microsoft has successfully brought topological qubits from the research phase into the engineering phase, “but it doesn’t mean that it will be the most adapted machine or that it will be able to scale the best.”
So while Microsoft may have achieved a genuine scientific breakthrough, we’re still a little way off the technology’s “iPhone moment”.
What happens next?
While Microsoft’s discovery won’t directly impact Europe’s quantum computing industry, it does make the company “a much more credible competitor”, according to Simon King, partner at Octopus Ventures.
Startup founders say that it’s encouraging to see a growing number of Big Tech companies taking an interest in quantum computing.
“It’s good for the ecosystem,” says Nicolas Proust, vice president of strategy and corporate development at Pasqal. “We can see that quantum is a very strategic topic that is nearing a level of maturity and pushing Big Tech to position themselves.”
In December, Google said that it had broken new ground on a technical challenge around the instability of quantum systems with its Willow chip. Nvidia is also looking closely at the technology and this year hosted its first ‘Quantum Day’ at its annual GPU Technology Conference (GTC).
This could lead to closer collaboration between startups and Big Tech companies in the near future, a dynamic that has been building over the past few years. “These Big Tech and startup partnerships are part of a strategy to cover the market to have the best offer, given that these technologies have different capabilities and uses,” says Proust.
At the end of 2024, Google invested in US-based quantum computing startup QuEra; IBM and Pasqal have been working in partnership since 2024 to create technologies that are compatible with different types of approaches to quantum computing. In 2023, Microsoft also invested in US quantum startup Photonic.
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/microsoft-quantum-breakthrough/
