In 2018, Microsoft said its researchers had detected evidence of their existence, an apparently major breakthrough it was forced to retract when the data was successfully challenged. Nature’s editors subsequently backed this up with the blunt note: “The results in this manuscript do not represent evidence for the presence of Majorana zero modes in the reported devices.”
Despite the setback, Microsoft persisted, in 2025 publishing a new paper in Nature that claimed the company had worked out how to exploit the principle in a new “transistor for the quantum age,” the Majorana 1 chip.
Earlier this month, the company launched its successor, Majorana 2, claiming that AI had helped to achieve a 1,000-fold improvement in reliability compared to the earlier chip. “With this progress, the team now expects to achieve a scalable quantum computer by 2029, cutting its original timeline in half,” the company announced.
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