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 millimetre) 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.
Microsoft’s quantum lab in Lyngby, Denmark
The company also announced the general availability of Microsoft Discovery, 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 Microsoft Discovery app 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.
Quantum computing chips rely on advanced semiconductor fabrication, requiring the same electronics specialty gases used in traditional microelectronics, with a heavy emphasis on ultra-cold environments.
Their production involves ultra-high purity and bulk gases such as helium, nitrogen, hydrogen and argon, as well as silane, ammonia and tungsten hexafluoride (deposition and precursor gases), sulfur hexafluoride and carbon tetrafluoride (etching and cleaning), and dopant gases (phosphine and diborane).
Next week helium security, the most pressing issue facing the semiconductor and AI economy, will be firmly in the spotlight at the Specialty Gas Summit 2026 in Frankfurt (9-11 June). Click .
