Microsoft announced the Majorana 1 quantum processing chip which is the first in the world to use Majorana fermion particles instead of electrons to function. Majorana fermions are subatomic particles that Microsoft says produce more stable qubits than qubits using electrons.
Majorana 1 comes with only 8 qubits at this time but Microsoft believes that in the future they can put up to 1 million qubits on a quantum processing chip that is only the size of a desktop computer chip. Quantum computers have the ability to perform complex processing that was previously impossible in a matter of minutes.
For example, Google's Willow quantum chip with 105 qubits solved a mathematical problem that took 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (10 septillion) years on the Frontier supercomputer in just 5 minutes.
Despite having high processing power, the problem with quantum chips is that they are prone to noise which causes data loss leading to errors. Therefore, more stable quantum computers need to be developed to make them more practical.
With the announcement of Majorana 1, Microsoft has been selected by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for the Underexplored Systems for Utility-Scale Quantum Computing (US2QC) project. The US2QC project aims to create a truly useful quantum computer in a matter of years, not decades.
Quantum computing technology has been explored by Microsoft for the past 17 years, and Majorana 1 is expected to be used to discover breakthrough technologies and new materials that were previously thought impossible even with the combined processing power of all the world's supercomputers.