MICROSOFT CLAIMS QUANTUM BREAKTHROUGH — NEW CHIP IS 1,000 TIMES MORE STABLE AND A PRACTICAL COMPUTER IS COMING BY 2029 Microsoft unveiled Majorana 2 at its Build conference in San Francisco, claiming it represents a significant leap forward in quantum computing stability. The company says the new chip achieves qubit parity lifetimes of around 20 seconds, compared to milliseconds in its predecessor, a roughly 1,000-fold improvement. The secret is a material swap. Microsoft replaced aluminum superconductors with lead ones and updated the semiconductor active region to a combination of indium arsenide and indium arsenide antimonide. These changes, developed partly with the help of Microsoft’s autonomous AI research platform called Microsoft Discovery, dramatically extended how long qubits hold their state without collapsing. Microsoft now says it is on track to build a scalable, commercially useful quantum computer by 2029, cutting its previous timeline in half. If that target holds, it would put quantum computing within reach of practical business applications far sooner than most analysts predicted. Not everyone is convinced. Topological quantum computing has a history of bold claims and retracted papers. Several physicists expressed skepticism about the announcement. The company has been down this road before. But qubit stability numbers of this magnitude, if independently verified, represent something genuinely unusual in a field where progress tends to come in fractions rather than factors of a thousand. Keywords: Microsoft Majorana 2, quantum computing 2026, quantum chip breakthrough, topological qubits