Tech giant Microsoft has unveiled Majorana 2, a quantum chip that it claims is ‘1,000 times more reliable’ than its predecessors.
It now expects to achieve a scalable quantum computer by 2029, halving its original timeline.
Microsoft applied recent advances in agentic AI, which sped up the scientific process and accelerated collaboration. It compared the improvements in qubits technology to a phone battery that ‘instead of dying in a day could last for nearly three years on a single charge’.
This reliability, fast speed (one microsecond operations) and small qubit size (1/100th of a millimeter) can help intractable problems in global health, food supply, sustainability, energy production and more, the company said.
“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,” said Chetan Nayak, Microsoft technical fellow. “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.”
Microsoft’s quantum lab in Lyngby, Denmark
The company also announced the general availability of , its comprehensive platform for organisations to embrace Frontier R&D.
This combines specialised AI agents for scientific research and development, a Discovery Engine that drives research and reasoning workflows.
Microsoft also introduced in early preview a with core capabilities that individuals can download for free and run locally on their computers with a GitHub Copilot account, lowering the barrier to entry for advanced AI-driven research.
Microsoft Discovery allows researchers to deploy autonomous agent teams, guided by human expertise, that can reason over large amounts of knowledge, generate hypotheses, optimise experiments, validate theories and learn in a continuous loop.
Built-in controls help ensure that the research remains aligned with priorities, security and compliance standards, and safety requirements.
“In the year since we launched, we’ve seen customers light up use cases across critical industries like life sciences, chemicals and materials, energy, manufacturing and consumer goods,” said Aseem Datar, Corporate Vice-President, Product Innovation for Microsoft Discovery. “With companies like Syensqo developing next-generation fluids for semiconductor manufacturing, the opportunities for impact are vast.”
Majorana 1, introduced last year, employed a topological superconductor, a special category of material that can create an entirely new state of matter that allows for more stable quantum computing. To improve on the original proof of concept, the team revisited the materials stack.
The original Majorana superconductor used aluminium, but Majorana 2 uses lead, which is commonly used to shield people and equipment from radiation in hospitals and industrial settings.
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