Overview
- Microsoft announced Majorana 2 at its Build conference on Tuesday, saying the chip shows roughly a 1,000-fold improvement in parity lifetimes that give mean qubit lifetimes above 20 seconds.
- The team credits a materials redesign that replaces aluminum superconductors with lead and updates the semiconductor region to indium arsenide/indium arsenide antimonide, and the device currently holds about 12 qubits.
- Microsoft says its Discovery agentic-AI platform sped materials discovery, automated measurements and workflow optimization, and the company is releasing Discovery to customers and developers.
- Independent physicists note the results are posted as a preprint, appear to come from a small number of device instances, omit some key measurements needed to prove topological qubits, and call for peer review and broader reproducibility.
- Microsoft has moved its commercialization timetable to aim for a scalable, practical quantum machine by 2029, a change that tightens the industry race and raises longer-term questions about cryptography, engineering scale-up and data transparency.