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This week on SHIFT
Microsoft picked what many consider to be the hardest path in quantum computing, the topological qubit, and stuck with it for twenty years. It might even be the longest-running research program at the company. The bet moved recently: by swapping aluminum for lead, its Majorana 2 chip now holds qubits stable for around 20 seconds, with up to a minute observed, in a field where lifetimes are usually measured in millionths of a second. Microsoft now says it expects to be solving commercially useful problems by 2029.
Jennifer sits down with Jason Zander, Microsoft's Executive Vice President of Discovery and Quantum. He’s a 34-year Microsoft veteran whose last tour was building out Azure. They get into why lead was so hard to crack, what AI is actually doing inside the lab, how he answers the skeptics, and why the race to useful quantum has become a question of national competition.
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Three things to listen for
1. Why lead, of all things
The whole field builds superconducting qubits with aluminum; lead is water-soluble and miserable to fabricate. Microsoft spent two and a half years cracking it because it widens the "topological gap" that keeps qubits alive. Zander's analogy: instead of charging your phone every day, you charge it once and it lasts three years.
2. What "AI cut the roadmap in half" actually means
Failure analysis that took PhDs days to a week now takes hours: when a device fails in the lab, AI characterizes the data, proposes the three likeliest causes and the four experiments to narrow them down. It's also working inside the fabrication process itself.
3. Why 2029 isn't a moonshot number
Two curves are converging: algorithmic advances have cut some chemistry problems from millions of qubits to a few hundred thousand, while the hardware matures. That intersection lands near 2029, the same year IBM targets, and a direct answer to Jensen Huang's claim that useful quantum is twenty years out.
"All of a sudden, it's like it's got the teacher's edition to the universe."
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