Google Quantum AI

53-qubit chip did in minutes a task framed as intractable for classical supercomputers.

Google reported in Science on 15 Oct 2026 the first hardware demonstration of magic state cultivation on its Willow processor: magic states prepared at a fidelity of at least 0.9999, with errors about 40 times lower than uncultivated states, keeping roughly 8% of attempts. Magic states are the resource that lets an error-corrected machine perform the non-Clifford gates every useful algorithm needs, and producing them has been expected to consume most of a fault-tolerant computer's hardware. Cultivation, proposed by Craig Gidney and colleagues in 2024, grows them in place far more cheaply than the older distillation factories. This is a peer-reviewed component result, not a fault-tolerant computer: Google's next step is to run cultivation at larger scale.

Errors fell as the code grew — the long-sought sign that scaling can work.