At Microsoft, we’re ushering in a new era of computing on the path to unlocking scientific advantage and tackling some of the world’s most pressing challenges. This is why we’re building Azure Quantum — to create the first platform for reliable quantum computing and achieve the vision of quantum at scale.
In April, we announced we’re entering the next phase for solving meaningful problems with reliable quantum computers by demonstrating the most reliable logical qubits with an error rate 800x better than physical qubits. The main issue with today’s noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) machines is that their physical qubits are too noisy and error-prone, making the machines impractical for real-world applications. That’s why we must transition to using reliable logical qubits that combine multiple physical qubits together to protect against noise and to maintain coherence for long-running computations.
But quantum computing doesn’t exist in isolation. It requires deep integration with the power of the cloud. We must leverage the best of computing to unlock a new generation of hybrid quantum applications that could solve some of our most pressing challenges — from pioneering more sustainable energy solutions to transforming how we treat disease with the next generation of life-saving therapeutics.
We designed the Azure Quantum compute platform to provide quantum computing across a variety of hardware architectures, enabling the most advanced hybrid quantum applications in the industry — all in a secure, unified and scalable cloud environment — to tackle classically intractable problems. This is our vision for Azure Quantum. Today, we continue to make advances that bring us closer to achieving it with our industry-leading partners, Quantinuum and Atom Computing. With both companies, we want to bring best-in-class solutions to the Azure Quantum platform, and collectively advance and scale resilient quantum capabilities.
In collaboration with Quantinuum, we applied our improved qubit-virtualization system to create and entangle 12 highly reliable logical qubits. This represents the largest number of entangled logical qubits, with the highest fidelity, on record. These results scale logical qubit computation — on ion-trap hardware — within our Azure Quantum compute platform. In addition, advancing toward scalable quantum computing necessitates not only reaching significant hardware milestones, but also proving these improvements can address practical and real-world challenges.
This is why we demonstrated the first end-to-end chemistry simulation that combines reliable logical quantum computation with cloud high-performance computing (HPC) and AI. Today’s announcements would not have been possible without Quantinuum’s leading quantum machines. This paves the way toward practical solutions at the intersection of these technologies, especially in the domains of chemistry, physics and life sciences.
Lastly, as we expand our Azure Quantum compute platform, we are excited to announce that Microsoft and Atom Computing are coming together to ultimately build the world’s most powerful quantum machine. Through this collaboration, we’re bringing a new generation of reliable quantum hardware to customers by integrating and advancing Atom Computing’s neutral-atom hardware into our Azure Quantum compute platform. With it, we are bringing the best-in-class from Microsoft and our partner ecosystem to provide the commercial offering of a reliable quantum machine.
Combining the capabilities of this reliable quantum hardware with our platform for Science, Azure Elements, we are providing a comprehensive discovery suite to achieve scientific quantum advantage.
Creating a new generation of hybrid quantum applications
At Microsoft, we’re pioneering a new computing paradigm by bringing the power of the cloud and AI together with quantum. Our Azure Quantum compute platform enables the seamless execution of quantum applications that leverage hardware across a variety of qubit architectures and chips, while offering integration with cloud HPC and AI. Over this past year, we’ve continued to announce new breakthroughs and collaborations in pursuit of this platform mission, including offering Generative Chemistry and Accelerated DFT and advancing the industry to reliable quantum computing by demonstrating highly reliable logical qubits.
We are bringing these technologies together in a purpose-built cloud platform that leverages the complementary strengths of both AI for large-scale data processing and quantum for complex calculations and unprecedented accuracy. This strong compute foundation offers a secure, unified and scalable hybrid computing environment that enables innovators to develop best-in-class solutions for tackling problems that are difficult or even intractable on classical computers. We are integrating quantum hardware architectures from our ecosystem partners with our quantum control, processing and error correction software — in addition to capabilities for copilot-assisted workflows, developer tools, classical supercomputing and multi-modal AI models. This differentiated computing stack will pave the way for this new generation of hybrid applications. AI co-reasoning will help articulate problems and translate them into workflows, using both classical and scaled quantum tools at the right stages to drive impactful insights in an iterative loop to compress R&D and time-to-solution into days, not years.
Continuing to implement reliable quantum computing with Quantinuum
Today, in collaboration with Quantinuum, we’re proud to announce the demonstration of the best performing logical qubits on record, achieving the largest number of entangled logical qubits. We created 12 logical qubits by improving and optimizing our qubit-virtualization system for Quantinuum’s 56-physical-qubits H2 machine.
This progress speaks to the world-class error correction expertise at Microsoft. In less than six months, our improved qubit-virtualization system tripled reliable logical qubit counts. Furthermore, when we entangled all 12 logical qubits in a complex state required for ‘deeper’ quantum computation, they exhibited a 22X circuit error rate improvement over the corresponding physical qubits.
The ability of our systems to triple the number of logical qubits while less than doubling our physical qubits from 30 to 56 physical qubits is a testament to the high fidelities and all-to-all connectivity of our H-Series trapped-ion hardware. Our current H2-1 hardware combined with Microsoft’s qubit-virtualization system is bringing us and our customers fully into Level 2 resilient quantum computing. This powerful collaboration will unlock even greater advancements when combined with the cutting-edge AI and HPC tools delivered through Azure Quantum.
— Rajeeb Hazra, CEO of Quantinuum
As we continue to strive toward scientific and industrial breakthroughs with quantum computers, noise remains our biggest barrier. In a previous post, I highlighted how increasing the number of physical qubits alone is not enough to make robust quantum error correction possible. As part of the quantum ecosystem, we must remain focused on improving both logical qubit counts and fidelity to have a solid foundation for producing meaningful results. This will be possible through hardware and software advancements that together enable running longer and more reliable quantum applications. Today’s announcement demonstrates that it is possible to realize these fundamental capabilities on the path to large-scale quantum computing.
A true computing paradigm shift also requires a focus on practical and commercially relevant applications. Earlier, we successfully completed a chemistry simulation in the first end-to-end workflow that combined HPC, AI and logical qubit computation to predict the ground state energy for a specific catalyst problem. This demonstration marked a critical step toward ushering in a new generation of hybrid applications that will become increasingly impactful as quantum technologies scale. Quantum and AI will have the earliest significant impact on scientific discovery, and researchers at Microsoft have demonstrated the breakthrough potential of this integration. This work was only possible thanks to our long-standing and close collaboration with Quantinuum, a company that remains at the forefront of quantum computing.
You can learn more about today’s improved logical qubits and the technical details about this chemistry simulation in our blog Microsoft and Quantinuum create 12 logical qubits and demonstrate a hybrid, end-to-end chemistry simulation.
Announcing a new commercial offering with Atom Computing
Lastly, in collaboration with Atom Computing, we are excited to bring a new generation of reliable quantum hardware to customers. Bringing together Microsoft’s enhanced qubit-virtualization system with Atom Computing’s neutral-atom hardware, we’ve jointly generated logical qubits and are optimizing the system to enable reliable quantum computation. Together, we believe this new commercial offering will be the world’s most powerful quantum machine on record and will scale to scientific advantage and beyond.
Atom Computing’s hardware uniquely combines capabilities essential for expanding quantum error correction, including large numbers of high-fidelity qubits, all-to-all qubit connectivity, long coherence times and mid-circuit measurements with qubit reset and reuse. The company is building 2nd generation systems with over 1,200 physical qubits and plans to increase the physical qubit count tenfold with each new hardware generation. By applying Microsoft’s state-of-the-art fault-tolerance protocols on a different qubit architecture, our Azure Quantum compute platform can offer a spectrum of best-in-class logical qubits across multiple hardware platforms, providing flexibility and future proofing our customers’ investments.
Our collaboration with Atom Computing aims to integrate these capabilities with Azure Elements, our purpose-built cloud platform offering differentiated computing scale, state-of-the-art AI models for chemistry and materials science simulations and Copilot. Our goal is to empower governments and organizations to tackle scientifically and commercially relevant problems with today’s most advanced computational solutions, including designing and predicting properties of chemicals and materials, exploring molecular interactions and simulating complex chemical reactions. Additionally, we want to help galvanize a quantum-ready ecosystem, providing the critical tools necessary for commercial adoption of these technologies that can help build quantum expertise and create new demand for jobs.
We are excited to accelerate Atom Computing’s quantum capabilities with Microsoft as our partner. We believe that this collaboration uniquely positions us to scale and be first to reach scientific quantum advantage. Our neutral-atom technology is an ideal foundation for Microsoft’s leading qubit-virtualization capabilities, and we look forward to enabling fault tolerant, cutting-edge quantum applications for global innovators to use the best platform in the world.
— Ben Bloom, PhD, Founder and CEO of Atom Computing
Empowering customers with the best of quantum and AI
At Microsoft, we want to enable practitioners to unlock a new generation of applications that harness the complementary strengths of quantum, classical supercomputing and AI, all connected in the Azure cloud.
We remain committed to achieving quantum at scale so we can solve commercially significant problems that are far too complex for classical computers. As a platform company, it’s critical that we continue investing in the quantum ecosystem and collaborating with industry leaders such as Quantinuum, Atom Computing, Photonic and others to advance and scale quantum capabilities. Alongside our industry collaborations, we’re also focused on our own innovation with a topological qubit-based approach.
This approach continues to offer a unique path to scaling up, with fast clock speeds, digital control and more. Furthermore, a topological quantum computer could control over one million physical qubits on a single chip, with the ability to process information faster than other types of qubits. Our Azure Quantum team previously demonstrated the feasibility of this approach, and we look forward to scaling this to the level of quantum supercomputing.
Azure is the place where all this innovation comes together. For more information about today’s announcements:
- Read the technical blog Microsoft and Quantinuum create 12 logical qubits and demonstrate a hybrid end-to-end chemistry simulation.
- Register for the upcoming Microsoft Quantum Innovator Series on how quantum and AI can unlock a new generation of hybrid applications for science.
- Get the latest news and announcements from Azure Quantum.