Google Reveals 'Willow' Quantum Computing Chip

Big tech is currently obsessed with scaling up artificial intelligence processing, but Google hasn't totally forgotten about its bet on quantum computing. The company has announced a new quantum processor known as Willow, which it claims is capable of solving a problem in five minutes that would take the fastest traditional computers 10 septillion years—that's a one followed by 25 zeros. Google says this advancement gets us closer than ever to a usable quantum computer, but you still shouldn't hold your breath waiting for that.

Quantum computing has the potential to be much faster than classical computing because it leverages the bizarre properties of matter that emerge at the smallest of scales. Quantum bits (or qubits) rely on superposition and entanglement to run some calculations orders of magnitude faster than classical computers, as seen in Google's laboratory tests of Willow. However, the processors need to ...