Google Just Made a Breakthrough in Quantum Computing With Its New Chip

Google’s latest project marks a major milestone in quantum computing.

On Monday, the corporation unveiled a new chip, dubbed Willow, that could prove pivotal to the development and potential large-scale use of the field. One of the new tech’s neatest tricks is that it needs just five minutes to solve a problem that would take the world’s most powerful supercomputers 10 septillion, or 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, years to complete, a report from Hartmut Neven, the founder and lead of Google’s Quantum AI division, says. That’s older than the universe, according to The New York Times.

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For the unversed, quantum computing is rather different from the kind of tech that operates today’s laptops and smartphones, the BBC reports. Rather than processing information with every bit represented by either a 1 or 0, quantum computers use (rather fittingly) quantum mechanics, a field of physics that studies subatomic particles, to operate. Because of this, quantum computers can solve problems much faster than traditional computers—and may even be able to solve issues that present-day tech can’t solve at all.

Though Willow and quantum computing in general remain largely theoretical in their applications, Nevens believes the field’s uses are innumerable. “[Quantum computing is] relevant when it comes to the design of nuclear fusion reactors to understand the functioning of drugs and pharmaceutical development, it would be relevant for developing better car batteries and another long list of such tasks,” the founder told the BBC.

One of the field’s main problems is the amount of errors that occur as more qubits (a.k.a. the basic information unit of quantum computing) are processed. Willow overcame that obstacle, however; it exponentially lowered mistakes as the amount of qubits increased, another major achievement of the tech. What makes the breakthrough even more impressive is that it took scientists some 30 years to complete the feat, Nevens says.

Google notes that to develop practically useful quantum computers, though, the error rate must be much lower that what Willow can currently produce, the BBC reports. So it could be some time (as well as billions of dollars of investment) before we see quantum computers become a reality—but nowhere near 10 septillion years, with any luck.

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