Microsoft's Topological Path to a Million-Qubit Chip

Microsoft's Majorana 1 chip introduces topological qubits designed to solve quantum computing's central bottleneck: error correction overhead. Current systems require hundreds or thousands of physical qubits to create a single usable logical qubit. Topological protection could dramatically reduce this ratio. Microsoft claims its architecture can scale to a million qubits on a palm-sized chip—a scaling claim that becomes plausible if the physics delivers intrinsic noise immunity that superconducting approaches lack.