Microsoft Reveals ‘1,000x More Reliable’ Quantum Chip as Bitcoin Threat Draws Nearer

Artificial intelligence is helping accelerate breakthroughs in quantum computing as researchers rush to build machines that could one day challenge the cryptography that secures Bitcoin and much of the modern internet.

At its annual Build conference on Tuesday, Microsoft unveiled Majorana 2, a new topological quantum chip that it claims is a thousand times more reliable than its predecessor. Microsoft said the chip achieves an average qubit lifetime of 20 seconds, with some lasting as long as a minute.

In one blog post Following the announcement, Microsoft said the Microsoft Discovery platform and agentic AI tools helped researchers analyze decades of quantum research, identify promising materials, automate measurements, optimize manufacturing processes and uncover manufacturing defects that improved qubit reliability.

“By applying recent advances in agentic AI, specifically designed to accelerate the scientific process and accelerate collaboration, Microsoft’s quantum team is overcoming key reliability, speed, and size barriers that have limited the application of quantum computing to real-life scenarios,” Microsoft wrote.

Majorana 2 builds on Microsoft’s Majorana 1 chip by replacing the aluminum-based topological superconductor with a lead-based design that better protects qubits from interference, a change that Microsoft says led to substantial improvements in reliability and speed. Combined with the compact qubit design, the company is bringing scalable quantum computing closer to reality, something the company now expects to achieve by 2029.

“We must make improvements every year that bring us closer to delivering a computer that we believe will have tremendous commercial and societal value,” Microsoft Technical Fellow Chetan Nayak said in a statement. “We have to keep marching towards that roadmap to achieve that, but where are we compared to last year? We are a thousand times better.”

To help researchers in multiple countries and disciplines navigate the project’s growing body of knowledge, Microsoft’s quantum team developed an AI agent that organizes, analyzes and surfaces information from across the program.

“Using agentic AI to automate the measurements was a game-changer,” said Zulfi Alam, corporate vice president for quantum at Microsoft. “It goes through some math and starts saying, ‘Hey, where do I find the lowest point where everything works?’ And it can do all these voltage adjustments in parallel, which a human cannot do. The way our minds work is more linear.”

The announcement comes amid ongoing concerns about “Q-Day,” the point at which a quantum computer becomes powerful enough to break widely used public-key cryptography, allowing attackers to derive private keys from publicly disclosed keys and steal money.

Bitcoin is widely expected to be one of the biggest targets if that happens, with around $461 billion worth of BTC reportedly at risk due to exposed keys. It’s a potential future that developers want to solve before it becomes a reality.

“What a quantum computer could do, and this is what’s relevant to Bitcoin, is forge the digital signatures that Bitcoin uses today,” Justin Thaler, research partner at Andreessen Horowitz and associate professor at Georgetown University, previously said. Declutter. “Someone with a quantum computer could authorize a transaction that takes all the Bitcoin out of your accounts, or however you want to think of it, and you haven’t authorized it. That’s the concern.”

Microsoft isn’t the only one reporting rapid progress. In October, Google’s Willow chip showed a significant reduction in quantum error rates, while more recent research from Caltech suggested that breaking elliptic curve cryptography may require fewer quantum resources than previously estimated.

Google predicted that Q-Day could happen in 2032, while other researchers said it could happen in 2030.