Industry reports or official announcements from companies

Google's Willow Quantum Chip Solves Problem in 5 Minutes, Surpassing Supercomputers

Dec 9, 2024, 04:14 PM

Google has unveiled its latest quantum computing chip, Willow, which represents a significant advancement in the field. The chip, with 105 improved qubits, can solve a benchmark computation in under five minutes, a task that would take the world's fastest supercomputers an estimated 10 septillion years to complete. This development showcases Google's progress in quantum error correction, as the Willow chip demonstrates exponential error reduction as qubits scale, paving the way for large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computers. The breakthrough was detailed in a paper published in Nature, marking a crucial milestone for quantum computing. Google's achievement has been described as a 'mind-boggling' leap in computing speed, although some reports caution that the problem solved has no immediate practical applications.