Quantum computing can power breakthroughs in medicine that would normally take today's systems millions of years to calculate.

Microsoft and Google have made breakthroughs in quantum computing, a technology that could revolutionize drug discovery and other fields.

Microsoft said it had reached a milestone in its quantum- computing journey, delivering a boost to shares of quantum pure plays such as D-Wave Quantum and Rigetti Computing on Thursday. The tech behemoth unveiled its Majorana 1 chip on Wednesday afternoon,

Microsoft says it has developed a breakthrough quantum processor based on a new state of matter, giving it a clear path to achieve quantum computing’s long-term promise of solving some of the world’s most difficult problems.

After many years of work, Microsoft has unveiled its first quantum hardware, the Majorana 1 processor. Let’s grok its topoconductor and tetron-based qubits.

Discover Microsoft’s Majorana 1 processor, a groundbreaking quantum leap in Quantum computing with scalable topological qubits for a million-qubit

Microsoft has long been working on an alternative that could cut down on the overhead by using components that are far more stable. These components, called Majorana quasiparticles, are not real particles. Instead, they are special patterns of behavior that may arise inside certain physical systems and under certain conditions.

Its Majorana 1 chip, made of a new material, can perform high-level computing tasks with greater speed and accuracy, Microsoft says.

Microsoft’s Majorana 1 just changed the quantum game. Could this breakthrough bring us closer to singularity faster than we thought?

With the development, Microsoft is raising the stakes in what is set to be the next big technological contest.

With its ‘topological’ quantum computers, Microsoft aims to reach useful scales faster than competing technologies