China-US chip war takes a quantum leap with breakthroughs declared on same day

Peking University and Microsoft research teams’ papers reveal very different approaches to achieving stable, error-free qubits

Reading Time:2 minutes

The hi-tech competition between the US and China saw details published this week of landmark quantum computing studies from both countries. Photo: Shutterstock

Published: 6:01pm, 21 Feb 2025Updated: 6:58pm, 21 Feb 2025

The global race for quantum supremacy has intensified, with research teams from China and the United States announcing major achievements in this week’s edition of the prestigious peer-reviewed journal Nature.

While Peking University researchers unveiled the world’s first large-scale quantum entanglement on an optical chip, a Microsoft team claimed to have created topological qubits – often regarded as a “holy grail” for the technology’s development.

The Chinese study used light to generate and control a network of interconnected quantum states, showing the potential to build a quantum network on a tiny chip – a crucial step towards a quantum-based internet where information is shared securely and efficiently.

One reviewer of the study called the achievement “an important milestone for scalable quantum information” and noted that similar experiments had previously been attempted in the US, Europe and Japan.

Meanwhile, Microsoft hailed its new chip Majorana 1 – designed to store up to a million qubits in a way that makes them resistant to the errors that plague the technology – as “a breakthrough in quantum computing”.

The technology moved closer to “harnessing millions of potential qubits working together to solve the unsolvable – from new medicines to revolutionary materials – all on a single chip”, the company wrote in a post on social media.