Microsoft’s Majorana 1 chip carves new path for quantum computing

Chetan Nayak, Technical Fellow and Corporate Vice President of Quantum Hardware, shared the following on the Microsoft Azure blog:

Quantum computers promise to transform science and society—but only after they achieve the scale that once seemed distant and elusive, and their reliability is ensured by quantum error correction. Today, [Microsoft is] announcing rapid advancements on the path to useful quantum computing:

• Majorana 1: the world’s first Quantum Processing Unit (QPU) powered by a Topological Core, designed to scale to a million qubits on a single chip.

• A hardware-protected topological qubit: research published [February 19, 2025] in Nature, along with data shared at the Station Q meeting, demonstrate [Microsoft's] ability to harness a new type of material and engineer a radically different type of qubit that is small, fast, and digitally controlled.

• A device roadmap to reliable quantum computation: [Microsoft's] path from single-qubit devices to arrays that enable quantum error correction.

• Building the world’s first fault-tolerant prototype (FTP) based on topological qubits: Microsoft is on track to build an FTP of a scalable quantum computer—in years, not decades—as part of the final phase of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Underexplored Systems for Utility-Scale Quantum Computing (US2QC) program.

Together, these milestones mark a pivotal moment in quantum computing.

Source: excerpt from: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/quantum/2025/02/19/microsoft-unveils-majorana-1-the-worlds-first-quantum-processor-powered-by-topological-qubits/