By Laura Hyde |
Microsoft says its new quantum chip Majorana 2 is 1,000 times more reliable than its predecessor (Majorana 1, launched in February 2025), paving the way for a scalable quantum computer, which it now expects to achieve by 2029.
Microsoft says with Majorana 2 it has increased average qubit lifetimes from milliseconds to around 20 seconds, with some lasting up to a minute.
“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. “We’ve got to keep marching to that roadmap to accomplish that, but where are we relative to last year? We’re 1,000 times better.”
Majorana 2 has been developed with the help of the Microsoft Discovery agentic AI platform, which is now generally available for organisations. It combines specialised AI agents for scientific research and development, driving reasoning workflows, enterprise-level security, governance and transparency. For individuals, Microsoft has released an early preview in the Microsoft Discovery app, which can be downloaded for free and run locally with a GitHub Copilot account.
Microsoft believes Microsoft Discovery is a commercial platform capable of helping scientists and organisations accelerate research and development. “In the year since we launched, we’ve seen customers light up use cases across critical industries like life sciences, chemicals and materials, energy, manufacturing and consumer goods,” said Aseem Datar, corporate vice president, product innovation for Microsoft Discovery. “With companies like Syensqo developing next-generation fluids for semiconductor manufacturing, the opportunities for impact are vast.”
Majorana 2 is a next-generation quantum chip built with the help of Microsoft Discovery’s agentic AI (credit: John Brecher for Microsoft)
While Majorana 1 employed an aluminium topological superconductor, the team revisited the materials stack to make improvements for Majorana 2. The new chip uses lead, which is commonly used to shield people and equipment from radiation in hospitals and industrial settings, making it an ideal material for a superconductor to help shield fragile qubits from cosmic disturbances that can make them unstable. “That was actually a fairly large change, and it led to big, big improvements in device quality,” said Nayak.
The team used agentic AI to help manage the manufacturing of the new chip, and Microsoft Discovery is being used more extensively for future Majorana materials work. Additionally, scientists, software engineers and fabrication experts across specialties, such as physics, mechanical engineering and process engineering at Microsoft’s Quantum Lab in Lyngby, Denmark, are using agentic AI across many of their processes to speed the development of more reliable topological qubits.
“The AI is able to synthesise knowledge from all these different disciplines,” said Zulfi Alam, corporate vice president for quantum at Microsoft, saving everyone time. He added the agentic AI can “parallel process so much information in super short time to give you a recommendation.” The AI only offers guidance; it doesn’t decide. “It’s always ‘scientist in the loop’,” he added.
“Agentic AI has permeated almost everything we do – it’s just become kind of a very natural part of our workflow,” said Nayak. “The agents can really accelerate things as much or as little as you want. It can be as little as pulling information together and summarising it, or it can go further down the road of synthesising it more or generating an interesting hypothesis. I think that’s extremely powerful right now.”
Microsoft says its new quantum chip Majorana 2 is 1,000 times more reliable than its predecessor