Google says it has solved a major problem in quantum computing by introducing a new quantum chip, Willow.
On Dec. 9, Google Quantum AI, part of Mountain View, California, technology giant Alphabet Inc., said it had made a significant step toward its goal of building “a useful, large-scale quantum computer.”
In a blog post published on Monday, Hartmut Neven, the founder and lead of Google Quantum AI, said a quantum computer could benefit humanity “by advancing scientific discovery, developing helpful applications, and tackling some of society’s greatest challenges.”
According to the post, the chip was made in an Alphabet-owned fabrication facility in Santa Barbara, California, which Neven called “one of only a few facilities in the world” built exclusively to manufacture advanced technology like the Willow chip.
In an X post, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said the chip is a “breakthrough that can reduce errors exponentially as we scale up using more qubits, cracking a 30-year challenge in the field.”
Pichai said Willow’s most notable achievement so far is its ability to solve what they called a “standard computation” that would take a leading supercomputer more than 10 septillion years, or “far beyond the age of the universe,” in less than five minutes.
According to Neven’s blog post, a qubit is the unit of computation in quantum computing. Because the computations are so fast, more qubits often lead to more errors.
In an article published in the journal Nature, Michael Newman and Kevin Satzinger, research scientists on Google Research’s Google Quantum AI team, said the Willow chip is a huge advance in the field because it eliminates errors as computations become more complex.
Newman and Satzinger said the achievement solves a 30-year-old problem in quantum computing and is a “key element to unlocking large-scale quantum applications.”
While error correction is an essential step toward making quantum computing a reality, Newman and Satzinger said in their blog post that they “still have a long way to go” before they reach their goal of “building a large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computer.”
In the blog post, Google laid out a six-step program for building a large, error-corrected quantum computer. The Willow chip is only the second of these steps. Next, Google wants to make a long-lived logical qubit, create a logical gate, go through an engineering scale-up, and finally deploy the computer.
While there are no apparent commercial applications for Willow yet, Neven said that one day, quantum computing could help humanity develop new medicines, make more efficient batteries for electric cars, and advance alternative energy technology.
“Many of these future game-changing applications won’t be feasible on classical computers; they’re waiting to be unlocked with quantum computing,” Neven said.
Both Tesla Inc. CEO Elon Musk and Palantir Technologies Inc. co-founder Joe Lonsdale shared the same one-word reaction on social media platform X.
“Wow,” Musk and Lonsdale wrote on Monday.
