Microsoft Majorana 1

Microsoft's Majorana 1 is the world's first quantum processor built on topological qubits, fundamentally solving the qubit fragility problem. In a February 2025 Nature paper, Microsoft demonstrated 8 topological qubits that encode information in the global topology of a physical system, using indium arsenide and aluminum heterostructures to host Majorana zero modes. This approach protects against errors at the physics level, unlike conventional superconducting or trapped-ion systems that require extensive software-based error correction. The architecture is designed to scale to 1 million qubits per chip, a density that makes fault-tolerant quantum computing a chip-design problem rather than a cryogenic scaling marathon. This represents a third route to fault tolerance, validated by scientific publication.