Next-Generation Technologies & Secure Development
Microsoft, Google and AWS cite major gains in reliability and error correction.
Resource-efficient, error-corrected quantum computers will arrive sooner than expected, experts say, as breakthroughs appear and snowball.
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Microsoft, Google and Amazon all announced major quantum computing advances within the past month such as more reliable qubits, AI-powered error correction and commercial fault-tolerant systems, fueling expectations that the timeline to the post-quantum era is shrinking.
Microsoft is the latest to announce an accelerated quantum transition timeline that includes crypto-agility such that encryption algorithms can be updated without having to redesign systems. It will also implement hardware-backed key protection, update certificate lifetimes and policies and audit critical signing and issuance processes.
The software giant is not the only one moving up its quantum-safe deadline. In the commercial space, Google and Cloudflare each accelerated their migration timelines to 2029. In the public sector, the U.S. government and France’s cybersecurity agency are pushing to shift away from older systems by 2030 (see; Trump Executive Order Accelerates Post-Quantum Security Push).
“What I’m seeing, just through regular reports and papers and announcements, is the leaps ahead in the development of the technology,” said Celia Merzbacher, executive director of Quantum Economic Development Consortium, a public-private quantum industry consortium supported by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. “We’re only going to see continued compression of timelines,” she told ISMG.
Microsoft announced last month a new quantum processor made of lead – called Majorana 2 – that is 1,000 times more reliable than its aluminum-based predecessor. The rapid progress allowed the company to compress its timeline by half, on track to deliver a scalable quantum computer by 2029.
“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, vice president of Quantum Hardware at Microsoft. “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.”
Whether a quantum computer will be efficient and useful depends on its error correction mechanism. Physical quantum bits, the basic hardware elements of a quantum computer, are prone to errors because they are sensitive to environmental noise like tiny changes in temperature or radiation from Wi-Fi.
The more fault-tolerant units are logical qubits, which group multiple physical qubits together to detect and fix errors automatically. Taking it a step further, Microsoft is building topological qubits, theorized to be the most stable, by storing quantum information in two ends of a superconducting nanowire to make it less sensitive at either end.
In the company’s latest advance, qubits perform calculations in microseconds while remaining stable for much longer before errors occur, allowing more operations to happen within that timeframe.
“In the aluminum-based Majorana 1, qubit lifetimes were between one and 12 milliseconds, whereas in Majorana 2, the lifetimes exceed 20 seconds, representing more than 1,000x improvement in stability,” Nayak said.
The breakthrough is enabled by AI. The Microsoft quantum team has been using the company’s agentic AI platform to manage workflows, automate measurements, optimize fabrication, pinpoint previously unnoticed flaws and propose new solutions, Microsoft said.
Similarly, at Google, the rapid advancement in AI is supercharging innovation in quantum computing. Researchers are using the technology to develop more efficient ways to stabilize quantum information and identify errors detected during quantum computations, said quantum scientist Maria Spiropulus and Google Quantum AI Founder Hartmut Neven in a paper.
Google DeepMind and Quantum AI teams collaborated to create AlphaQubit, a machine learning-based decoding system that spots patterns, fixes errors and decodes signals on its own. The tool outperformed the best human-designed methods in finding errors, Spiropulus and Hartmut said.
“While quantum computing holds promise for advancing artificial intelligence in the future, AI is already accelerating quantum technology today,” the researchers said.
Amazon AWS also announced last month that it will build a fault-tolerant commercial quantum computer by 2028, in collaboration with quantum computing startup QuEra. The capability will be incorporated into Amazon Braket, a cloud service where developers build and test quantum algorithms.
The computer, named Libra, is expected to execute “one million quantum operations over hundreds of logical qubits,” said Eric Kessler, general manager of Amazon Braket.
“We aim to continue to expand these capabilities over the following years, to ultimately realize the full potential of quantum computing and unlock commercial applications across industries including pharmaceuticals, financial services, and advanced materials,” Kessler said.