Overview
- Microsoft unveiled Majorana 2 on Tuesday and reported a roughly 1,000-fold improvement in qubit stability, with average parity lifetimes above 20 seconds and some near one minute.
- The company says the advance comes from a new materials stack that swaps aluminum for lead and from Microsoft Discovery, an agentic AI platform that sped materials design, fabrication and automated measurements.
- Majorana 2 holds a small number of qubits—around 12—and Microsoft frames the result as enough to halve its roadmap and aim for a practical, scalable quantum computer by 2029.
- Independent physicists stress the preprint is not peer reviewed, note that key qubit operations and full reproducibility have not been publicly demonstrated, and say the data could be explained by non-topological effects.
- Microsoft says it shared detailed data with DARPA while withholding some results as trade secrets, and the announcement revives industry and cryptography questions given the field’s prior retractions and long-standing skepticism about Majorana claims.