Google Says It Just Cracked One of Quantum Computing's Biggest Bottlenecks

JUST IN: Google says its Willow chip has cracked one of quantum computing's biggest bottlenecks, cutting errors 40x on the 'magic states' quantum computers burn through, a step toward machines that could one day threaten today's encryption.

Google just cut quantum computing's error rate forty times over.

The chip is called Willow, and the breakthrough is about something with a genuinely great name, magic states. These are the special quantum states a quantum computer burns through to do anything useful, and making clean ones has been one of the field's nastiest bottlenecks. Google says Willow now produces them with forty times fewer errors. You can see the lab where this came out of right here.

Why should you care? Because the end of this road is a machine that can break the encryption protecting your bank, your messages, basically the internet. We're not there yet, not close, but every one of these steps shortens the timeline, and the people who run cryptography for a living are watching this chip very carefully.

Google didn't just make a faster computer. It got measurably closer to the one that picks every lock we own.

This is Liu Yang, reporting for HIT.