Microsoft says its Majorana 2 chip was built using AI – and it helped deliver huge performance gains

Microsoft has hailed a significant breakthrough with its Majorana 2 quantum chip, which it claims is vastly more powerful than its predecessor – and AI helped make it possible.

Developed with the help of Microsoft Discovery’s agentic AI, the Majorana 2 topological quantum chip's cubits can maintain their quantum state 1,000 times longer than the first generation.

It has a mean qubit lifetime of 20 seconds, with some instances lasting as long as a minute.

“We need to make improvements each year that will get us closer to delivering a computer that we believe will have massive commercial and societal value,” said Chetan Nayak, Microsoft technical fellow.

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“We’ve got to keep marching to that roadmap to accomplish that, but where are we relative to last year? We’re 1,000 times better.”

While the original Majorana superconductor was based on aluminum, Majorana 2 uses lead, which has delivered marked efficiency improvements. By using lead, this helps shield fragile qubits from cosmic disturbances that can make them unstable.

“That was actually a fairly large change, and it led to big, big improvements in device quality,” Nayak said.

AI played a key role in Majorana 2 improvements

Microsoft specifically highlighted the use of Microsoft Discovery, designed to help organizations embrace Frontier R&D, in the project.

This combines specialized AI agents for scientific research and development with a Discovery Engine that drives research and reasoning workflows, along with enterprise-level security, governance, and transparency.

The system was used to manage workflows, automate measurements, optimize fabrication, pinpoint previously unnoticed flaws, and propose new solutions.

Critical parts of the Majorana quantum devices are designed atom by atom, the company noted. To keep each atom in the right spot, another material, an impurity, can be added to the crystalline structure.

Zulfi Alam, corporate vice president for quantum at Microsoft, said the system enabled the team to spot probable targets and fine-tune development processes.

Meanwhile, it also helped handle nearly two decades’ worth of data, in many different formats.

“As you run AI agents on this data, they’re able to essentially resynthesize and make correlations that we as humans cannot see because no single individual has that much vision across that much data,” said Alam.

Supercharged development

Creating a topological state requires setting hundreds of parameters, a process that, when carried out by a human, takes weeks – but Microsoft said the use of agentic AI cut this by orders of magnitude.

Alongside this, AI’s pattern-recognition abilities helped with the difficult task of measuring what state the qubit is in and detecting whether there’s an even or odd number of billions of electrons on a semiconductor wire.

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

Microsoft has now made Microsoft Discovery generally available, along with an app with core capabilities that individuals can download for free and run locally on their computers with a GitHub Copilot account.

“In the year since we launched, we’ve seen customers light up use cases across critical industries like life sciences, chemicals and materials, energy, manufacturing and consumer goods,” said Aseem Datar, corporate vice president, product innovation for Microsoft Discovery.

“With companies like Syensqo developing next-generation fluids for semiconductor manufacturing, the opportunities for impact are vast.”

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