Microsoft on Wednesday (February 19) unveiled a new chip that it said showed quantum computing is "years, not decades" away, joining Google and IBM in predicting that a fundamental change in computing technology is much closer than recently believed.

Quantum computing holds the promise of carrying out calculations that would take today's systems millions of years and could unlock discoveries in medicine, chemistry and many other fields where near-infinite seas of possible combinations of molecules confound classical computers.

Quantum computers also hold the danger of upending today's cybersecurity systems, where most encryption relies on the assumption that it would take too long to brute force gain access.

The biggest challenge of quantum computers is that a fundamental building block called a qubit, which is similar to a bit in classical computing, is incredibly fast but also extremely difficult to control and prone to errors.

Microsoft said the Majorana 1 chip it has developed is less prone to those errors than rivals and provided as evidence a scientific paper set to be published in academic journal Nature.

The company says it developed a new type of material, the world's first 'topoconductor', that can manage Majorana particles for more reliable and scalable qubits, the foundation of quantum computers. Much like semiconductors enabled modern electronics, topoconductors pave the way for quantum systems capable of handling a million qubits and solving complex problems.

"It's called a topological superconductor or topoconductor for short, and this is something that people have hypothesized for decades and but no one really reliably created this in the laboratory or had been able to harness it for quantum information processing," explained Microsoft's Dr Chetan Nayak.

When useful quantum computers will arrive has become a topic of debate in the upper echelons of the tech industry. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said last month that the technology was two decades away from overtaking his company's chips, the workhorses of artificial intelligence, reflecting broad skepticism.

Those remarks prompted Google, which last year showed off its own new quantum chip, to say that commercial quantum computing applications are only five years away. IBM has said large-scale quantum computers will be online by 2033.

Microsoft's Majorana 1 has been in the works for nearly two decades and relies on a subatomic particle called the Majorana fermion, whose existence was first theorized in the 1930s. That particle has properties that make it less prone to the errors that plague quantum computers, but it has been hard for physicists to find and control.

Microsoft said it created the Majorana 1 chip with indium arsenide and aluminum. The device uses a superconducting nanowire to observe the particles and can be controlled with standard computing equipment.

The chip Microsoft revealed Wednesday has far fewer qubits than rival chips from Google and IBM, but Microsoft believes that far fewer of its Majorana-based qubits will be needed to make useful computers because the error rates are lower.

Microsoft did not give a timeline for when the chip - fabricated at the company's labs in Washington state and Denmark - would be scaled up to create quantum computers that can outstrip today's machines, but the company said in a blog post that point was "years, not decades" away.

(Production: Stephen Nellis/Stuart McDill/Matt Stock)