Google Unveils Cutting-Edge Quantum Computing Chip "Willow" Measuring 4 Square Centimetres

Google has unveiled a quantum computing chip that has overcome a key challenge in quantum computing. The new chip, called Willow, manufactured in the Californian beach town of Santa Barbara, measures just 4 square centimetres. It could speed up the creation of new drugs by significantly accelerating the experimental phase of development. Willow is claimed to be much less error-prone than previous versions and could expand the potential of the artificial intelligence industry, which is already developing rapidly.

The quantum chip takes only five minutes to complete tasks that take the fastest conventional computers in the world 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years to complete. That's 10 septillion years, a number that far exceeds the age of our known universe, and has led the scientists behind the latest breakthrough in quantum computing to use a decidedly non-technical term: ‘staggering’.

Earlier in 2019, IBM disputed Google's claim that Google's quantum chip had solved a problem that would have taken a classical computer 10,000 years to solve, saying the problem could be solved in two and a half days using different technical assumptions about the classical system.

In a blog post on Monday, Google said it had taken some of these concerns into account in its latest estimates. Even under the most idealistic of conditions, Google said, a classic computer would take a billion years to produce the same results as its latest chip.

Some of Google's competitors are producing chips with more qubits than Google, but Google is focused on creating the most reliable qubits it can, Anthony Megrant, chief architect of Google Quantum AI, said in an interview.