Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Michelangelo once said that “genius is eternal patience.” But it is rare to find many companies today that think much beyond the next quarter, let alone keep plugging away for 20 years at a speculative science project that may never work. That used to be the job of universities. Excitement therefore amps up when a company produces early proof of a significant breakthrough. That has been the research rollercoaster ride that Microsoft has experienced in stubbornly sticking with its novel approach to quantum computing. This week, its persistence paid off as the US tech company unveiled Majorana 1, the world’s first quantum chip powered by a topological core architecture. Microsoft’s ability to exploit a new kind of matter to create a new type of qubit (or quantum bit) promises to accelerate the development of reliable large-scale quantum computing. This is a pivotal moment, it claims, in switching from scientific exploration to technological innovation.“We’re very excited about this,” Jason Zander, Microsoft’s executive vice-president responsible for next-generation technologies, told the FT. “For us, this is a big one. It’s kind of a generational technology like moving from vacuum tubes to a semiconductor.”The advantages of Microsoft’s topological qubits are that they are fast and digitally controlled. That should enable them to scale more reliably to the 1mn qubit threshold that researchers consider necessary for sophisticated quantum computation. But it will still take years of experimental engineering before the company can deploy its quantum processing units (QPUs) in data centres alongside the classical graphics processing units (GPUs) that are currently powering the AI revolution.Nevertheless, the company still hopes to build a utility-scale quantum computer by the end of the decade configured to tackle a set of problems that no classical computer can address. By exploiting the special properties of a quantum computer, Zander reckons researchers will be able to develop new catalysts to break down microplastics, enhance the fertility of soils or develop new forms of self-healing concrete, for example.Steven Simon, professor of theoretical physics at Oxford university who has followed Microsoft’s research, says it is remarkable how the company kept faith in topological qubits despite the setbacks. “It’s absolutely terrific that they have had that long a timeframe and the vision to keep this funding going, even when at some points it looked like this approach wasn’t really panning out.”The development of a robust quantum computer would have huge geostrategic implications by cracking commonly used encryption methods used on the internet today, a scenario known as Q-day. For that reason, both the US and China are racing to develop the technology. The US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, responsible for developing technologies for military use, has selected Microsoft alongside PsiQuantum to assess whether they can build industrially useful quantum computers quicker than conventional predictions.As ever, with announcements in the mind-bendingly complex field of quantum computing, some wariness is in order. Peer reviewers of Microsoft’s paper, published in Nature, qualified the research findings. And in 2018, Microsoft was forced to withdraw a joint paper after admitting inconsistencies in the data. “It is not conclusive yet,” Steve Brierley, chief executive of the quantum computing company Riverlane, tells me. “But it certainly helps in the race to build the first error-corrected quantum computer.”Other companies, including Google, IBM and Quantinuum, have more operational qubits and are conducting basic quantum computing operations. But investor confidence in the sector was knocked recently when Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s chief executive, said that useful quantum computers remained 20 years away. Microsoft’s progress therefore comes as a welcome adrenaline shot for the industry even as some question its ambitious timetable. “I think it looks feasible. But I would say five years is optimistic,” one leading physicist tells me. Until then, the rudimentary quantum computers that exist today can be used to produce useful outputs. “Quantum can become part of the arsenal of special purpose add-ons for computing,” he says.We will have to wait a few more years before we see the full promise of quantum computing. But if there is one thing that Microsoft has already demonstrated, it is patience.john.thornhill@ft.com
