Microsoft gives DARPA on-site access to Majorana 2 quantum hardware at new Maryland center

Microsoft said on Tuesday that it will give the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) direct, on-site access to its latest quantum computing hardware, as part of a new research center the company opened in Maryland together with the University of Maryland and other industry partners.

The center is located in the university's Discovery District near Washington, D.C., and will house a quantum system built around Microsoft's Majorana 2 chip, which DARPA will test and evaluate independently.

A dedicated DARPA space in Maryland

Until now, DARPA has evaluated Microsoft's technology remotely, reaching machines located in Redmond, Washington, and in Europe. The Maryland installation changes that: the agency gets physical access to a dedicated space where its experts can load hardware and run it through their own boot sequences.

Zulfi Alam, corporate vice president of Microsoft Quantum, said the arrangement is "a big deal for us because it essentially enables DARPA to kick the tires and to sort of figure out how good this machine is and how it's performing."

Engineering rigor and cost as the measure

According to Alam, the arrangement imposes discipline on Microsoft as it moves from research toward a commercial product. DARPA's key evaluation metric is whether the value of the computation a quantum system performs outweighs the cost of the system.

"It enforces a certain amount of engineering rigor that scientific teams normally do not have," he said, describing DARPA as "a completely trusted organization" with which Microsoft can share both current work and future plans.

Alam said DARPA will start with the Majorana 2 chip, but the system in Maryland is being built so that future chips Microsoft is developing can be swapped in.

Why it matters

Quantum computers promise to tackle problems that would take conventional machines thousands of years. Of particular interest to national security experts is protecting and cracking encrypted communications.

Microsoft is one of a number of quantum firms being evaluated by DARPA to find out whether any quantum computing approach can yield economically feasible systems by 2033. Microsoft has said it plans to have commercial quantum systems ready by 2029.