Majorana 2, made more reliable with Microsoft Discovery agentic AI
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Written by<br>Catherine Bolgar
Published
June 2, 2026
Category
AI
The news
Microsoft unveils Majorana 2, its next-generation topological quantum chip developed with the help of Microsoft Discovery’s agentic AI.
Majorana 2’s new features include a new materials stack enabling a 1,000-fold improvement in reliability over the prior generation of qubits, with a mean qubit lifetime of 20 seconds and instances lasting as long as one minute.
Microsoft now expects to achieve a scalable quantum computer by 2029, cutting its original timeline in half.
Microsoft Discovery is now generally available. The platform for Frontier R&D lets customers deploy AI agent teams, guided by human expertise, to speed up scientific discovery.
The new Microsoft Discovery app provides a local version of the platform’s core capabilities that individuals can download for free and use with a GitHub Copilot account.
Microsoft today unveiled Majorana 2, its newest topological quantum chip featuring a next-generation materials stack and qubits that are 1,000 times more reliable than their predecessors. With this progress, the team now expects to achieve a scalable quantum computer by 2029, cutting its original timeline in half.
By applying recent advances in agentic AI specially designed to speed the scientific process and accelerate collaboration, Microsoft’s quantum team is overcoming key barriers in reliability, speed and size that have limited the application of quantum computing to real-life scenarios.
For instance, the new chip’s qubits can maintain their quantum state 1,000 times longer than the first generation, enabling more reliable computation. While other common approaches measure a qubit’s “lifetime” in microseconds, Majorana 2 offers a mean qubit lifetime of 20 seconds, with some instances lasting as long as one minute. That improvement is roughly comparable to inventing a phone battery that instead of dying in a day could last for nearly three years on a single charge.
This exceptional reliability, fast speed (one microsecond operations) and small qubit size (1/100th of a millimeter) have put the team on a path to achieve a scalable quantum computer that is commercially valuable by 2029. Such a machine could tackle intractable problems in global health, food supply, sustainability, energy production and more, the company said.
“We need to make improvements each year that will get us closer to delivering a computer that we believe will have massive commercial and societal value,” said Chetan Nayak, Microsoft technical fellow. “We’ve got to keep marching to that roadmap to accomplish that, but where are we relative to last year? We’re 1,000 times better.”
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Now, others searching for scientific or engineering breakthroughs can leverage the same agentic AI expertise that Microsoft’s own quantum team is using in its Majorana program.
The company also announced today the general availability of Microsoft Discovery, its comprehensive platform for organizations to embrace Frontier R&D. This combines specialized AI agents for scientific research and development, a Discovery Engine that drives research and reasoning workflows, plus enterprise-level security, governance and transparency.
Microsoft also introduced in early preview a Microsoft Discovery app with core capabilities that individuals can download for free and run locally on their computers with a GitHub Copilot account, lowering the barrier to entry for advanced AI-driven research.
Microsoft Discovery allows researchers to deploy autonomous agent teams, guided by human expertise, that can reason over large amounts of knowledge, generate hypotheses, optimize experiments, validate theories and learn in a continuous loop. Built-in controls help ensure that the research remains aligned with priorities, security and compliance standards, and safety...