Microsoft has announced the creation of Majorana 1, a quantum computing chip powered by the world’s first topoconductor. The company claims this breakthrough will accelerate the development of scalable quantum computers within years rather than decades.

The technology is based on topoconductors, a category of material developed by Microsoft that achieves a new state of matter—neither solid, liquid, nor gas, but a topological state. This enables the creation of quantum systems capable of scaling to one million qubits on a single chip.

Microsoft has also developed a Topological Core, featuring eight topological qubits that are smaller, faster, and more stable than conventional qubits. These qubits, measuring just 1/100th of a millimetre, are designed with built-in hardware-based error resistance and controlled digitally.

The breakthrough has received academic and government validation, with Nature publishing a peer-reviewed paper supporting Microsoft’s approach. The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has also selected Microsoft’s topoconductor technology as part of its efforts to advance fault-tolerant quantum computing.