Microsoft announces Majorana 2 quantum chip with claimed 1,000x reliability improvement

Microsoft announced the general availability of Microsoft Discovery, its Azure-based platform for deploying autonomous AI agent teams in scientific R&D. The platform powered the development of Majorana 2, a topological quantum chip with 1,000x reliability improvement and 20-second qubit lifetimes. Microsoft now targets a scalable quantum computer by 2029, halving its original timeline. By Steef-Jan Wiggers

June 2, 2026: Majorana 2 unveiled · 1,000× reliability improvement · 20-second mean qubit lifetime (up to 1 minute) · 1 microsecond…Continue reading on Medium »

The Majorana 2 quantum processor is built from topological qubits, and its creators claim it can sustain quantum coherence for an average of 20 seconds — orders of magnitude longer than the milliseconds that conventional chips last.

With the release of its new Majorana 2 chip, Microsoft claims agentic AI has dramatically accelerated its timeline to scale a commercial-grade quantum computer.

Microsoft says its new Majorana 2 quantum chip is 1,000 times more reliable than its predecessor, with qubits lasting about 20 seconds instead of milliseconds, and claims it could have a commercially useful quantum machine by 2029. The BBC reports: "We will have a quantum machine in 2029 that can solve commercially viable, reasonable problems," said Zulfi Alam, corporate vice president of Microsoft Quantum. That would still require huge further advances as such a device would require millions of qubits - the current chip, Alam said, has 12. Assessing the firm's claims are difficult because it does not release the full details of what it has discovered publicly, citing commercial confidentiality. Microsoft has spent 20 years pursuing an approach to quantum computing known as "topological." The firm's approach to this is based on exploiting the properties of a so-called quasi-particle, which had existed only in theory, since it was first predicted in the 1930s by Italian physicist Ettore Majorana. To do this it had to exploit a novel state of matter - different from the three familiar states of liquid, solid or gas. Paul Stevenson, a physics professor at the University of Surrey, said the tech giant's timeline sounded plausible - if its research lived up to its claims. "Microsoft appears to have made a leap in their attempt to produce viable topological qubits," he said. "If they succeed, they will leap from being a player with no production quantum computer, to being a serious player in the race to make the next generation of fault-tolerant machines." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Built with the help of AI agents, Microsoft's Majorana 2 takes a different approach to quantum computing, focusing on hardware-level stability as rivals like Google push scaling and error correction