Microsoft's Majorana 2 chip carries 12 qubits. The particle it is named for is contested

Microsoft's second-generation topological quantum chip, Majorana 2, has been revealed and carries 12 qubits, which the firm says are now longer-lasting and more reliable than its predecessor's. The chip was shown to a broadcast reporter given what the report called a rare look inside Microsoft's largest quantum lab, in Lyngby, just outside the Danish capital. Twelve is a modest number by the standards of an industry where, as the same report noted, some rivals have already surpassed thousands of qubits.

The tour took cameras through the materials lab where Microsoft grows the semiconductor and superconductor layers on its wafers, into a clean room where the qubits are patterned through several rounds of lithography, and up to the chandelier-like cooling device beneath which the chips sit in operation. A Microsoft staff member said one qubit measures a hundredth of a millimetre, adding: "We can actually fill this entire space up with qubits. That's how we get to a million in the palm of your hand." Another described the operating environment as "colder than outer space," giving a figure of 16.4 above absolute zero. The unit attached to that number is garbled in the available transcript — it is rendered as "16.4 m°C" — so US In News is not able to state the temperature unit with confidence.

What is not settled is the physics underneath. The report stated directly that "some physicists and quantum computing experts have argued, however, that the tech giant's conclusions are built on unproven particles and flawed data analysis," while adding that "Microsoft stands by its results." No individual critic was named on air and no specific paper or dataset was identified, so the substance of the objection — and how far it extends across the field — is not established by this coverage. The report also contains an unexplained discrepancy: a chip shown during the clean-room segment is described on camera as having eight qubits, while Majorana 2 is described as having 12. Whether these are the same device at different stages, or two different chips, is not made clear in the report, and US In News has not corroborated either reading.

What changed and why the qubit count is not the headline

Microsoft's approach is described in the report as "fundamentally different to the other tech giants." Where ordinary computers, tablets and phones run on bits that are zero or one, the report explained, quantum machines use non-binary units called qubits, "formed from strings of one and zero and everything in between all at the same time, which in theory makes data processing much, much faster." The company's specific bet is topological quantum computing, which depends on an elusive subatomic particle called a Majorana that Microsoft claims it has hunted down in research taking two decades.

That bet is the context for presenting 12 qubits as progress rather than embarrassment. The stated obstacle across the whole industry is not quantity but stability: qubits are, in the report's phrasing, "notoriously unstable," and making them "reliable and durable enough to do useful computations that are error-free" is described as a big challenge facing the whole industry. A Microsoft speaker framed the trade-off directly: "We believe that a high-scale quantum computer that works well has to have a system of qubits that are small, they're fast, and they're accurate. You must have all three. There's other computer designs for those where you'd actually need an entire football pitch to actually put a million qubits."

On the near-term path, a Microsoft speaker said the aim is to "scale that first to hundreds and then thousands and that beyond" while holding error rates low. Newer versions of the chips are being tested continuously with the aim of adding more qubits, and the report said the use of AI has speeded up development in the materials lab. The three-year horizon widely attached to this announcement was stated by the reporter, attributed to the company rather than spoken by a Microsoft employee on camera: the work "could pave the way, the firm says, for a quantum computer that can solve commercially useful problems within the next 3 years."

The framing from Microsoft

We believe it's years, not decades. It's years. There's a great deal of new solutions that will come out of this work.

A second Microsoft speaker reached for a longer historical comparison: "Creating a new form of computation, a new type of computer, that just doesn't happen very often. Once in a generation, and I'm convinced that just like the transistor is incredibly, you know, important today and will be in the future, so will quantum computers." The potential applications named in the report were materials research, drug discoveries and code breaking — problems said to be capable of taking conventional computers hundreds, thousands or even millions of years.

What it signals

The two disputes visible in this report are separable, and the coverage blurs them. Nothing in the broadcast contests that Microsoft has built fabrication capability in Lyngby: the robots, the wafer growth, the lithography and the cryogenic hardware are all shown. The contested claim is narrower and prior — whether the Majorana particle the whole topological approach rests on has actually been demonstrated. That is a question no camera tour can settle, and this report does not attempt to.

The distinction determines what 12 qubits means. If the underlying particle claim holds, a small, fast, accurate qubit is the mechanism by which Microsoft hopes, in the report's word, to "leapfrog" competitors sitting on thousands of noisier ones — which is why the company can present a low count as an advantage and invoke the football-pitch comparison. If it does not hold, the same number is a count of devices built on an unconfirmed premise, and the comparison to rival qubit totals is not the relevant scoreboard at all. The report does not adjudicate between these, and neither can US In News on the basis of a single broadcast.

What is checkable is the clock. A commercially useful quantum computer "within the next 3 years" is a near-term, falsifiable promise rather than the open-ended horizon such announcements usually carry — and the report's own closing verdict was the unresolved one: "We're not there yet, but it could offer huge promise if the hope can live up to the hype."

US In News compiled this account from a single cached broadcast transcript filed from Microsoft's quantum laboratory in Lyngby, Denmark (YouTube video ID 2JgJ1MRhntg). The transcript does not identify the broadcaster, and a search of our transcript index returned no second broadcast covering the Majorana 2 announcement or the scientific objections to it. Nothing here is corroborated across outlets, and the account should be read as one unnamed newsroom's reporting. Figures, qubit counts and timelines are as reported and may change.