Microsoft’s Majorana 2 doubles reliability, targets 2029

Microsoft is unveiling Majorana 2, its next-generation topological quantum chip, after last year’s Majorana 1 drew skepticism from physicists. The company says qubit reliability has surged—from 1–12 milliseconds on Majorana 1 to lifetimes exceeding 20 seconds

For quantum computing to move from promise to practice, it needs one thing more than flashy demos: time. Time for qubits to hold their quantum state long enough to be useful.

That is the argument Microsoft is making today with Majorana 2. the next-generation topological quantum chip that the company says is built to deliver qubits that last far longer than its earlier Majorana 1 design. Last year, Microsoft claimed a key breakthrough with Majorana 1, its first quantum processor, and physicists were immediately skeptical. Now the software giant is betting that a big jump in stability will change the conversation.

Majorana 2 uses qubits—quantum computing’s unit of information, analogous to the binary bits used in today’s computers. Microsoft says its new qubits are 1,000 times more reliable. To get there, the company says it improved Majorana 1’s material stack to create a more stable topological phase.

Chetan Nayak, Microsoft technical fellow and corporate vice president of quantum hardware, described the shift in direct terms. “To create Majorana 2, the Microsoft Quantum team improved Majorana 1’s material stack to create a morestable topological phase,” Nayak said. “Majorana 2 replaces Majorana 1’s superconductor. aluminum. with lead. and also updates the semiconductor active region to a combination of indium arsenide and indium arsenide antimonide.”.

Those material changes, Microsoft says, translate into better qubit performance. “In the aluminum-based Majorana 1. qubit lifetimes were between one and 12 milliseconds. whereas in Majorana 2. the lifetimes exceed 20 seconds. representing more than 1. 000x improvement in stability. ” Nayak said. Microsoft adds that some qubit lifetimes now exceed a minute—an increase it says is significant enough to convince the company it has made “enough significant progress to promise useful quantum computing much sooner.”.

On that basis, Microsoft says it is accelerating its roadmap. “Based on this rapid progress, we are accelerating our roadmap to a scalable, practical quantum computer,” Nayak said. “We have cut our timeline in half and now aim to reach this target by 2029.”

The company is working toward a fault-tolerant prototype quantum computer based on topological qubits, with the longer-term goal of using quantum computing to solve some of the world’s most difficult problems.

There is also a second thread running alongside the hardware announcement. Microsoft is releasing Discovery, the platform that helped improve its Majorana chips, to customers today. Microsoft Discovery is designed to help apply agentic workflows to research and development programs. A local app version of Microsoft Discovery is now available on GitHub. and Microsoft says researchers can use a GitHub Copilot account to access it.

Taken together, today’s announcement places reliability and timing at the center of Microsoft’s pitch: if Majorana 2 can keep qubits stable for the kind of durations the company is reporting, it doesn’t just extend the experiment—it redraws the roadmap that skeptics have been waiting to see hold up.

Microsoft Majorana 2 quantum computing topological qubits Majorana 1 Chetan Nayak quantum hardware fault-tolerant quantum computer Microsoft Discovery agentic workflows GitHub Copilot