Google has announced a major breakthrough in quantum computing, claiming the world’s first verifiable quantum advantage—a milestone that marks a critical step toward building practical, fault-tolerant quantum computers.
The achievement was powered by Google’s new high-performance quantum chip, Willow, which the company says demonstrated computational capabilities beyond the reach of classical supercomputers.
In a press statement, Google said that the experiment represents “one of the most complex in the history of quantum computing” and underscores the precision and speed engineered into its superconducting quantum systems.
The demonstration, centered on an algorithm called Quantum Echoes, verified that Willow could execute highly intricate quantum operations at a scale and fidelity previously thought to be unattainable.
Willow is a superconducting quantum processor built on research that earned physicists John Clarke, Michel Devoret, and John Martinis the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics for their pioneering work on macroscopic quantum effects.
The chip’s 105 qubits—quantum bits that serve as the building blocks of quantum computers—achieved gate fidelities of 99.97 percent for single-qubit operations and 99.88 percent for entangling gates.
These operations were performed at speeds ranging from tens to hundreds of nanoseconds, setting a new industry benchmark for quantum performance.
The Quantum Echoes algorithm, which reverses the flow of quantum data to analyze the internal dynamics of complex systems such as molecules, required Willow to perform millions of intricate quantum gate operations and measurements in quick succession.
Google engineers reported that the chip performed over one trillion measurements throughout the project, representing a significant share of all measurements ever conducted on quantum processors to date.
“This milestone is a critical step toward realizing useful quantum computation,” the company said, noting that the results “concretely place our work in a regime beyond the capabilities of classical computers.”
By successfully executing the Quantum Echoes experiment, Google said Willow had demonstrated “verifiable quantum advantage”—a term referring to quantum computations that can be validated and confirmed as outperforming classical machines.
The achievement builds on Google’s established roadmap for quantum computing.
The company first demonstrated “beyond-classical” quantum computation in 2019 and followed it up with a quantum error correction prototype in 2023.
The release of Willow in 2024 marked the company’s third major milestone—demonstrating below-threshold quantum error correction, a step toward reducing computational errors to levels that can be efficiently corrected.
In Thursday’s announcement, Google reiterated its long-term goal of developing a fault-tolerant quantum computer—a system capable of running indefinitely without errors through self-correction.
“As we march toward our next milestone—a long-lived logical qubit—we are fully aware of the numerous challenges ahead,” the company stated. “Reaching our ultimate goal will require orders-of-magnitude improvement in system performance and scale, with millions of components to be developed and matured.”
The tech giant emphasized that the path ahead remains complex, involving advances in materials, chip fabrication, cryogenic control systems, and error correction algorithms.
Nonetheless, Google said it remains committed to “navigating this path forward” as part of its broader Quantum AI program.
With the Willow experiment, Google positions itself at the forefront of global quantum research, pushing the field closer to real-world applications such as molecular simulation, cryptography, and advanced materials design—areas where quantum systems are expected to eventually outperform the most powerful classical supercomputers.
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