Recent announcements from Microsoft and Google are injecting new excitement into quantum computing. WSJ reporter Asa Fitch gives a primer on what quantum computing is, explains what Microsoft’s potential breakthrough could mean and projects where the real-world future of this tech could land.
Sign up for the WSJ's free Technology newsletter.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
[00:00:00] Du bist immer am Puls der Zeit und gerne up-to-date? Dann ist der Now Brief des neuen Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra genau das Richtige für Dich. Stau auf dem Weg zur Arbeit? Dann wird Dir automatisch geraten, früher loszufahren. Es regnet am Zielort? Dann empfiehlt es Dir, den Regenschirm mitzunehmen. Mit dem Galaxy S25 Ultra kannst Du einen Schritt voraus sein. Neugierig? Erfahre mehr auf samsung.de
[00:00:29] Welcome to Tech News Briefing. It's Tuesday, February 25th. I'm Charlotte Gartenberg for The Wall Street Journal. Last week, Microsoft researchers announced an approach to quantum computing that the company claimed involved the creation of a new state of matter. Not liquid, gas, or solid. That followed Google in December touting its own breakthrough in quantum chip design.
[00:00:52] Both scientific advances were followed by a surge in quantum-related stock prices. But what is quantum computing? And what exactly are researchers and investors betting it can do? Here to give us a primer on quantum computing and take us through some of the potential real-world applications of the tech is WSJ reporter Asa Fitch.
[00:01:15] All right, Asa, we've talked about this before on the show, but it's worth recapping for listeners given the recent news. What is a quantum computer? So a quantum computer is, in a way, like a normal computer that you and I use every day. Those computers use something called bits. There's a bunch of little on-off switches that, when you combine them together, do different things, like add things up or tell your computer what to display on a screen.
[00:01:38] But a quantum computer uses something called a qubit. And a qubit is a bit different from a bit. It's not a regular on-off switch. It can have an on state or an off state, but it can be sort of a mixture of both of those things at the same time. It creates some interesting features. Because of the way these things interact with each other, they can contain more information at a single point in time, so they can figure out all the possibilities for something.
[00:02:04] Because it's able to do this kind of fast calculation and fast combination of things and simulation of things, it can do that much, much faster than your average computer these days. Think of it as like you're trying to unlock a door and you need to find the right combination or whatever. And if you have a system that could try a bunch of things at the same time, you'd get there faster than if you had to go through every single iteration. We mentioned Google and Microsoft. What are some of the other companies exploring quantum computing?
[00:02:32] IBM has explored quantum for a very long time. You have a bunch of smaller companies like IonQ, D-Wave, etc., that have come up in recent years. Some of those are listed companies these days. A lot of people see promise in quantum computing. They see it as something that could lead to new, better drugs, for example. Things like physical simulations of the world that are quite complex. And so you'd have better batteries, for example. That's one of the ideas people have that it could do.
[00:03:00] So there are a lot of great applications. There are a lot of companies that have come up to try to harness this thing. So we talked a little bit about how it works, but in order to help us with scale, what can quantum do that a regular supercomputer can't? One of the big ones is drug discovery. You're trying to figure out combinations of proteins and other things like that that result in drugs that cure serious diseases. You've got to try a lot of things, right? And so trying a lot of things means, you know, in a computational sense, you've got to simulate a lot of things,
[00:03:29] a lot of variables moving at the same time. And there have been, of course, for many, many years, efforts to do this using regular computers, and those have been successful, but they take a long time. The promise with quantum is that it could just take much less time to figure out these simulations, to solve these problems and thus to create new drugs. How much less time? If you look at some of the comparisons on quantum equations and how long it takes current computers
[00:03:56] to solve them versus quantum computers to solve them, in one benchmark last year, Google said it took 24 septillion years for a regular computer to solve an equation that took their quantum computer five minutes or something like that to solve. So you get a sense of what the scale is when you hear something like that. So 10 septillion is a 10 with 24 zeros. So a long time. Coming up, Microsoft researchers say they created a chip that leverages a new state of matter.
[00:04:24] What it is and what it could mean for the future of quantum computing. That's after the break. ServiceNow unterstützt ihre Business Transformation mit der KI-Plattform. Alle reden über KI, aber die KI ist nur so leistungsfähig wie die Plattform, auf der sie aufbaut. Lassen Sie die KI arbeiten, für alle. Beseitigen Sie Reibung und Frustration Ihrer Mitarbeiter und nutzen Sie das volle Potenzial Ihrer Entwickler.
[00:04:51] Mit intelligenten Tools für Ihren Service, um Kunden zu begeistern. All das auf einer einzigen Plattform. Deshalb funktioniert die Welt mit ServiceNow. Mehr auf servicenow.de slash AI for people. So last week, Microsoft researchers said they created a chip that leverages a new state of matter. Not a liquid, a solid or a gas.
[00:05:19] Fill me in on this because I don't quite understand. The basic idea is they claim to have created what they call a topological superconductor. It's basically a little tiny thing that allows them to do quantum computing in a way that hadn't been possible in the past, if you believe what they've claimed. And they say that they're actually able to scale up the qubits and make them quite large, quite fast.
[00:05:44] They were talking about a million, potentially a million qubits on a single chip, which would be absolutely unheard of. Today's most advanced quantum computers have numbers of qubits in the thousands, and that's really pushing it. Above a thousand qubits these days is pretty big. So if, and there's a big if, and there's a lot of skepticism about this, if it pans out, it could be big for quantum going forward. What are these researchers basing this on? What's the evidence they're using here?
[00:06:12] They've published their paper in Nature, of course, the famous scientific journal. But some physicists have questioned the viability of these claims, the big quantum computer being created out of these things. You know, it's part of the natural cycle of scientific discovery and the testing of the claims that people make. It's certainly not a sure thing in a couple of dimensions. I mean, there's questions about their research and like whether it actually is going to do what they say it can do. And then there's the question of how do you actually practically do this?
[00:06:42] Right now, this is a science project. It's not a real thing. How do you take that science project and make it a commercially viable quantum computer that anybody off the street could come and use? That's the real question. And we're very, very far from there being something like that. Why is this new state of matter important to quantum computing? It's basically just a lot of engineering that creates a new state of matter that's able to do things with quantum bits in their claims, I guess, that we weren't able to do before.
[00:07:11] You're chilling things to absolute zero. Many quantum strategies involve, or almost all of them really, involve cooling something to near absolute zero to stabilize things and allow them to measure things on a sort of quantum level. There's a lot of noise that comes out when you start to scale up a quantum computer with many qubits. And that's been a big issue for people. And they have confidence that they can reduce those errors and really make it work.
[00:07:35] They're able to zero in on a quantum bit and use microwaves to measure them and figure out what state they're in. I mean, that's the big problem with quantum bit. Like, you have a quantum bit. You have to then measure it and figure out what it is. Is it a zero? Is it a one? What is it? So they figured out that bit as well. And they talked about that. It's a lot of technical stuff. But there's a lot of promise there, potentially, for the industry. Let's say it's successful and becomes commercially viable.
[00:08:02] What are the potential dangers of successful and widespread quantum computing, based on your reporting? One is that a very good quantum computer could potentially crack a lot of today's encryption, which would be bad for people who want to encrypt data and privacy. But, I mean, the good news there is that people are well aware of this problem. And there's still a lot of time to solve the problem before it really becomes an issue. There's a lot of preparation going on to develop encryption methods that are, quote-unquote, quantum proof.
[00:08:32] So if there were a big quantum computer, it still wouldn't be able to solve that kind of encryption or break that encryption. All right. It sounds like it's still early days for this tech. But how soon can we start seeing some of the business potential from quantum computing? For quantum to become as ubiquitous as regular computing is, it might never happen.
[00:08:54] But for it to become a sort of useful scientific tool that people use in business, you ask different people, they have different views on it. But on the optimistic side, people would say in the next several years. And then if you ask the pessimist, they'd say the next couple of decades, potentially. It's clear that more and more powerful quantum computers are being developed, but it could be a long time. That was WSJ reporter Asa Fitch. And that's it for Tech News Briefing.
[00:09:21] Today's show was produced by Jess Jupiter with supervising producer Catherine Millsop. I'm Charlotte Gartenberg for The Wall Street Journal. We'll be back this afternoon with TNB Tech Minute. Thanks for listening.