Photo attributed to John Brecher.
Discover Majorana 2 here.
Microsoft has unveiled Majorana 2 at its annual developer conference MicrosoftBuild, currently being held in San Francisco. Majorana 2 is Microsoft’s next-generation topological quantum chip developed “with the help” of Microsoft Discovery’s agentic AI.
By applying recent advances in agentic AI, Microsoft now expects to achieve a scalable quantum computer by 2029, cutting its original timeline in half.
Microsoft has revealed that the new chip’s qubits can maintain their quantum state 1,000 times longer than the first generation, enabling more reliable computation. While other common approaches measure a qubit’s “lifetime” in microseconds, Majorana 2 offers a mean qubit lifetime of 20 seconds, with some instances lasting as long as one minute (claim based on Microsoft internal testing and evaluation). The example used to illustrate its improvement is roughly comparable to inventing a phone battery that instead of dying in a day could last for nearly three years on a single charge.
Chetan Nayak, Microsoft technical fellow, said:
“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. 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.”
The original Majorana superconductor, introduced in 2025, used aluminum, but Majorana 2 uses lead, which is commonly used to shield people and equipment from radiation in hospitals and industrial settings. In a quantum computer, a lead superconductor helps shield fragile qubits from cosmic disturbances that can make them unstable.
Creating a topological state requires setting hundreds of parameters, and then applying measurement. Using agentic capabilities available in Microsoft Discovery, the team was able to create an AI agent specialised for parameter setting and measuring and capturing data, which cut the cycle time by orders of magnitude.
