Microsoft Majorana 2 chip extends qubit lifetimes 1,000x

Microsoft announced the Majorana 2 topological quantum chip and said it achieves roughly 1,000 times longer qubit lifetimes than the company’s first-generation device. The company reported a mean coherence time of about 20 seconds, with some qubits remaining coherent for as long as one minute.

The new chip uses a lead-based superconductor instead of the aluminum used in the original Majorana device. Microsoft described the material change as improving device quality by better shielding qubits from cosmic and environmental disturbances that can collapse their quantum state.

Chetan Nayak, a Microsoft technical fellow, framed the result as year-over-year progress and summarized the comparison to the prior device by noting the roughly 1,000-fold improvement.

Microsoft said it used its Microsoft Discovery platform-an agentic AI system that combines specialized scientific agents with a Discovery Engine and enterprise governance-to speed and refine development. The company reported that the system managed experimental workflows, automated measurements, optimized fabrication steps, identified previously unnoticed defects and proposed solutions.

Zulfi Alam, corporate vice president for quantum at Microsoft, described how the AI handled large volumes of legacy experimental data and found correlations across datasets that were difficult for individual researchers to spot. Alam called the automation of measurements a ‘‘game changer,’’ saying the agents could run many voltage and parameter adjustments in parallel and locate operating points faster than manual tuning.

Majorana 2 devices are assembled atom by atom, and stabilizing those arrangements often requires introducing specific impurities into the crystal lattice. Microsoft said the AI helped identify promising impurity targets and refine fabrication processes. Creating the topological state that protects quantum information requires setting hundreds of parameters; the company said agentic AI reduced the time needed to find optimal settings by exploring configurations in parallel.

Microsoft has made Microsoft Discovery generally available and offers a free local app for users with a GitHub Copilot account. Aseem Datar, corporate vice president for product innovation at Microsoft Discovery, noted that customers in life sciences, chemicals and materials, energy, manufacturing and consumer goods have begun using the platform, and he cited companies working on semiconductor-related fluids as examples of industrial use.

Majorana qubits rely on topological states of matter that are designed to be more resistant to noise than conventional qubits. Microsoft described Majorana 2 as a step on a multi-year plan to build a larger, commercially useful quantum computer, with improvements measured in device lifetime, fabrication quality and the integration of AI-driven research tools.