Microsoft creates chip it says shows quantum computers are 'years, not decades' away

Microsoft on Wednesday unveiled a new chip that it said showed quantum computing is “years, not decades” away.

Microsoft on Wednesday unveiled a new chip that it said showed quantum computing is "years, not decades" away, joining Google and IBM in predicting that a fundamental change in computing technology is much closer than recently believed.

Quantum computing holds the promise of carrying out calculations that would take today's systems millions of years and could unlock discoveries in medicine, chemistry and many other fields where near-infinite seas of possible combinations of molecules confound classical computers.

Quantum computers also hold the danger of upending today's cybersecurity systems, where most encryption relies on the assumption that it would take too long to brute force gain access.

The biggest challenge of quantum computers is that a fundamental building block called a qubit, which is similar to a bit in classical computing, is incredibly fast but also extremely difficult to control and prone to errors.

Microsoft said the Majorana 1 chip it has developed is less prone to those errors than rivals and provided as evidence a scientific paper set to be published in academic journal Nature.

When useful quantum computers will arrive has become a topic of debate in the upper echelons of the tech industry. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said last month that the technology was two decades away from overtaking his company's chips, the workhorses of artificial intelligence, reflecting broad skepticism.

Those remarks prompted Google, which last year showed off its own new quantum chip, to say that commercial quantum computing applications are only five years away. IBM has said large-scale quantum computers will be online by 2033.