Microsoft Announces Majorana 2 Quantum Chip, Claims 1,000x Reliability Boost but Lacks Peer Review

Microsoft announced its Majorana 2 quantum chip at the Build 2026 conference in San Francisco. The 12-qubit device records average qubit lifetimes of 20 seconds, with some reaching one minute, compared with one to 12 milliseconds on the 2025 Majorana 1 chip. The company states that the new qubits are 1,000 times more reliable than those on its predecessor.

Majorana 2 replaces aluminum with lead as the superconductor and updates the semiconductor active region to a combination of indium arsenide and indium arsenide antimonide. Microsoft has cut its timeline for a scalable, practical quantum computer in half and now aims to reach this target by 2029.

"We will have a quantum machine in 2029 that can solve commercially viable, reasonable problems," said Zulfi Alam, corporate vice president of Microsoft Quantum.

The firm has spent 20 years pursuing a topological approach based on a quasi-particle first predicted in the 1930s by Italian physicist Ettore Majorana. Its first Majorana chip was released in 2025. U.S. Defence research agency DARPA. The agency aims to verify and validate the firm's utility-scale quantum computer concept, and Microsoft says it has shared all data and workings, including commercially sensitive material.

A paper published alongside the announcement has not been peer reviewed.

Microsoft used its Discovery agentic AI to help design Majorana 2, though Jason Zander, executive vice president of Microsoft Quantum and Discovery, said the idea of changing materials was conceived by human scientists. "We stand behind it 100%. We really look to scientific rigor.

We welcome the debate that has always been part of physics... the key thing I would tell people, go read the papers and look what's there, go talk to the experts that we have given deep information to," Zander said. Microsoft is releasing Discovery, the platform that helped improve its Majorana chips, to customers.

A local app version is now available on GitHub, and researchers can use a GitHub Copilot account to access it. Paul Stevenson, a physics professor at the University of Surrey, said the timeline sounded plausible if the research lived up to its claims. Henry Legg, a physicist at the University of St Andrews, had previously questioned the firm's approach.