12/10/2024

Meet Willow, Google's State-of-the-art Quantum Chip

Its new chip demonstrates error correction and enhanced performance

Today, I'm delighted to announce Willow, Google's latest quantum chip. Willow has state-of-the-art performance across a number of metrics, enabling two major achievements.

• The first is that Willow can reduce errors exponentially as we scale up using more qubits. This cracks a key challenge in quantum error correction that the field has pursued for almost 30 years.
• Second, Willow performed a standard benchmark computation in under five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 10 septillion (that is, 10²⁵) years — a number that vastly exceeds the age of the universe.

The Willow chip is a major step on a journey that began over 10 years ago. When I founded Google Quantum AI in 2012, the vision was to build a useful, large-scale quantum computer that could harness quantum mechanics — the “operating system” of nature to the extent we know it today — to benefit society by advancing scientific discovery, developing helpful applications, and tackling some of society's greatest challenges. As part of Google Research, our team has charted a long-term roadmap, and Willow moves us significantly along that path towards commercially relevant applications.

Please select this link to read the complete press release on Google's blog.