Microsoft quantum strategy faces new scrutiny over Nature critique

A Nature critique published June 24 by University of St Andrews physicist Henry Legg challenged Microsoft’s February 19, 2025 paper on the Majorana 1 chip, sharpening questions about Microsoft’s quantum strategy. Microsoft stands behind its research and its quantum program is making practical progress.

The dispute centers on one of Microsoft’s core scientific claims: that a gap in an otherwise highly conductive wire points to a state of matter that could support more stable qubits, the fragile units at the heart of quantum computing. Legg’s challenge in Nature’s peer-reviewed Matters Arising forum questioned how firm the evidence is behind the claim, without triggering a retraction of the original paper.

Microsoft’s June 2 announcement of Majorana 2 doubled down on the same approach. The new chip uses a new materials stack, its qubits are 1,000 times more reliable than the prior generation, and some have a mean lifetime of 20 seconds, with instances lasting as long as one minute. Jason Zander put the timeline at 2029, cutting the company’s earlier goal in half.

The Trump administration has invested $2 billion in quantum computing and set a goal of a scientific quantum system by 2028, while IBM planned in May to spend $10 billion on quantum machines. Microsoft has spent nearly two decades pursuing a topological-qubit design different from rivals such as IBM and Alphabet’s Google, with the aim of outperforming more conventional hardware.

Two Microsoft-backed Nature papers were retracted, and editors flagged concerns about two others, one in Nature and one in Science. Two Nature publications from the Microsoft-linked Delft line of work were withdrawn in 2021 because of irregularities in data processing, selection and publication.