Microsoft has announced its roadmap for building its own quantum supercomputer that can solve impactful problems that even the most powerful supercomputers cannot.
To build the quantum supercomputer, Microsoft said that it “will follow a similar path as classical supercomputers did in the 20th century. From vacuum tubes to transistors, to integrated circuits, advances in underlying technology will enable scale and impact”.
According to the company, quantum hardware will fall into one of the three categories of Quantum Computing Implementation Levels, which include Level 1 — Foundational (Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum); Level 2 — Resilient (reliable logical qubits); and Level 3 — Scale (Quantum supercomputers).
Presently, Microsoft has achieved the first milestone toward a quantum supercomputer.
“We can now create and control Majorana quasiparticles. With this achievement, we’re well on our way to engineering a new hardware-protected qubit. With it, we can then engineer reliable logical qubits to reach the Resilient Level and then progress to reach Scale,” Jason Zander, Executive Vice President, of Strategic Missions and Technologies, Microsoft said in a blog post.
Moreover, the tech giant said that a quantum supercomputer will be able to solve problems that are intractable on a classical computer and scale to solve the most complex problems facing our world. To do this, it must be both performant and reliable.
In addition, Microsoft announced Azure Quantum Elements, which combines high-performance computing, artificial intelligence, and quantum technology to accelerate scientific discovery, as well as Copilot for Azure Quantum, an artificial intelligence model that can assist scientists (and students) in creating quantum simulations and calculations.
