The U.S. tech giant said it has devised “the transistor for the quantum age” in what it calls its Majorana 1 chip. The processor creates a type of material that has long been hypothesized but only recently created in real life, and can read and reliably work with large numbers of qubits, the building blocks of quantum computing. (The Logic)

Talking point: Microsoft matched the chip announcement with papers on the underlying science in peer-reviewed Nature (albeit with two of four reviewers saying it was too weak to publish) and the chip’s design on the open-access Arxiv service. The Majorana 1 chip holds eight qubits but Microsoft said it’s scalable to a million. Google’s quantum computing roadmap has that many qubits working together as its most distant future milestone; IBM’s posits “thousands” of qubits in a quantum supercomputer sometime after 2033. Even if the million-qubit promise bears out, a Majorana chip would be a key component in a useful quantum device but not the whole thing. Nevertheless, Microsoft said this could mean a working prototype quantum computer is years away—not decades.