Introducing Majorana 2 How Microsoft’s new quantum chip was made 1,000x more reliable with the help of Microsoft Discovery’s agentic AI The news - Microsoft unveils Majorana 2, its next-generation topological quantum chip developed with the help of Microsoft Discovery’s agentic AI. - Majorana 2’s new features include a new materials stack enabling a 1,000-fold improvement in reliability over the prior generation of qubits, with a mean qubit lifetime of 20 seconds and instances lasting as long as one minute. - Microsoft now expects to achieve a scalable quantum computer by 2029, cutting its original timeline in half. - Microsoft Discovery is now generally available. The platform for Frontier R&D lets customers deploy AI agent teams, guided by human expertise, to speed up scientific discovery. - The new Microsoft Discovery app provides a local version of the platform’s core capabilities that individuals can download for free and use with a GitHub Copilot account. Microsoft today unveiled Majorana 2, its newest topological quantum chip featuring a next-generation materials stack and qubits that are 1,000 times more reliable than their predecessors. With this progress, the team now expects to achieve a scalable quantum computer by 2029, cutting its original timeline in half. By applying recent advances in agentic AI specially designed to speed the scientific process and accelerate collaboration, Microsoft’s quantum team is overcoming key barriers in reliability, speed and size that have limited the application of quantum computing to real-life scenarios. For instance, the new chip’s qubits can maintain their quantum state 1,000 times longer than the first generation, enabling more reliable computation. While other common approaches measure a qubit’s “lifetime” in microseconds, Majorana 2 offers a mean qubit lifetime of 20 seconds, with some instances lasting as long as one minute. That improvement is roughly comparable to inventing a phone