MSFT: Microsoft Stock Jumps 1% on Quantum Chip Powered by New State of Matter

Are you quantum-ready? Following Google’s quantum leap, Microsoft said it has invented a new state of matter to power its quantum chip.

🤖 Microsoft Shares Steady After Big Blog Drop

• Microsoft stock MSFT powered (only?) 1% on Wednesday as investors didn’t show much of a reaction to some potentially game-changing news. The tech giant’s vice president of quantum computing Chetan Nayak took to the company’s blog section to publish a piece on a product he billed as a “breakthrough.”
• It’s a new quantum chip that’s powered by (don’t mess it up now) topological superconductivity, “a new state of matter that previously existed only in theory.”

👋 Meet Majorana 1

• The new quantum hardware — Majorana 1 — is a quantum processor similar to transistors in traditional computers’ semiconductor chips with the difference that it’s beefed up to hold 1 million topological qubits. What’s that? We’ll let the PMK explain it.
• “The basic structure of a topological qubit places a suitable semiconductor nanowire in close proximity to a superconductor. Due to the proximity, the semiconductor nanowire also becomes superconducting and under the right conditions (including an appropriate magnetic field along the wire and voltages applied to the device) the semiconductor nanowire enters the topological phase.”

👉 First Parallel Universes, Now a New State of Matter?

• “It’s perhaps not surprising that quantum computation would require us to engineer a new state of matter specifically designed to enable it,” Nayak wrote.
• Microsoft believes that this new invention will open the door to manufacturing commercially usable and viable quantum computing within five years. The announcement comes a couple of months after Google GOOGL unveiled a similar thing with its parallel universes teaser.