Microsoft started going down this road nearly 20 years ago, and that research has now yielded what looks like a significant quantum-computing breakthrough. The Majorana 1 chip contains eight qubits, or quantum bits, far fewer than top-tier quantum computers currently in operation.

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Microsoft said it created eight topological qubits and placed them on its new Majorana 1 processor, but there was a "clear path" to fitting each chip with a million qubits, the requisite "threshold for quantum computers to deliver transformative,