Inside the subzero lair of the world’s most powerful quantum computer

It looks like a golden chandelier and contains the coldest place in the universe.

I focus not just on the world’s most powerful computers, but on technologies critical to financial security, Bitcoin, government secrets, the world economy, and more.

Quantum computing holds the key to success or failure for businesses and countries for the remainder of the 21st century.

A meter high in the air in front of me, inside the Google factory in Santa Barbara, California, Willow levitates. Frankly, it wasn’t what I expected.

There’s no screen or keyboard, let alone a holographic head camera or brain-reading chip.

Willow is a series of oil drum-sized discs connected by hundreds of black control wires that are lowered into a bronze liquid helium bath refrigerator to keep the quantum microchip at a thousandth of a degree above absolute zero.

It looks and feels very eighties, but if the potential of Quantum is realized, the metal and wire jellyfish structure in front of me will change the world in so many ways.

“Welcome to our quantum AI lab,” said Hartmut Neven, Google’s director of quantum AI, as we walked through the high-security doors.

Neven is a legend, part technical genius, part techno music lover who dresses like he came straight from skiing at Burning Man, for which he designed the artwork. Maybe he did it in a parallel universe – more on that later.

His mission is to translate theoretical physics into functional quantum computers “to solve otherwise unsolvable problems,” and he admits to being biased but says the chandeliers are the best-performing in the world.

Much of our conversation was about what we were not allowed to film in this restricted lab. This critical technology is subject to export controls and secrecy, and is at the heart of the race for commercial and economic supremacy. Any slight advantage, from the shape of a new part to a company in a global supply chain, is a source of potential leverage.

The art and colors of this palace of higher sciences are imbued with a distinctly Californian vibe. Each quantum computer has a name, like “Yakushima” or “Mendocino,” and they’re wrapped in a contemporary art piece, with various graffiti-style murals decorating the walls illuminated by bright winter sunlight.

Neven holds up Google’s latest quantum chip, Willow, which has achieved two important milestones. He said it settled “once and for all” the discussion about whether quantum computers can accomplish tasks that conventional computers cannot.

Willow also solved a benchmark problem in minutes that would have taken 10 of the world’s best computers seven hundred million years, so more than a trillion trillion years, or 25 zeros at the end, longer than the age of the universe.

This theoretical result has recently been applied to quantum echo algorithms, which are impossible with conventional computers and helps to understand molecular structures from the same techniques used in MRI machines.

Neven gushed about the ways he believes Willow quantum chips will be used to “help solve many of the problems humanity faces now.”

“This will allow us to discover drugs more efficiently,” he said. “It will help us improve the efficiency of food production, help us produce energy, transport energy, store energy…to solve the problems of climate change and human hunger.”

“It allows us to better understand nature, then unlock its secrets and develop technologies that make life more enjoyable for all of us,” he told me.

Some researchers believe that true artificial intelligence will only be truly possible through quantum.

Members of the team here have just won a Nobel Prize for their original research on the “superconducting qubits” used here.

The Willow chip has 105 qubits. Microsoft’s quantum research has 8 qubitsbut using different methods. Competitions around the world aim to obtain 1 million qubits and create a “practical-scale machine” capable of error-free quantum chemistry and drug design. The technology is fragile.

What happens here is being closely watched around the world. Professor Sir Peter Knight, chairman of the National Quantum Technologies Programme’s strategic advisory committee, said Willow was breaking new ground.

“All machines are really still in the toy model stage, and they make mistakes. They need error correction. Willow was the first to show that error correction can be done through iterative repair, and therefore improvement,” he said.

This puts the technology on track to perform exactly one trillion operations within seven or eight years, rather than the twenty years previously assumed.

If the first 25 years of this century were the rise of the Internet and artificial intelligence, then the next 25 years will definitely be the beginning of the quantum era.

Imagine trying to find a tennis ball among a thousand closed drawers. Classic computers open each one in sequence. Quantum computers turn on all of these simultaneously. Or similarly, in ordinary computing, quantum computing allows you to use one key to open all a hundred doors at once, instead of needing a hundred keys to open a hundred doors.

These machines are not for everyone. They won’t shrink down to mobile phones, AI glasses or laptops. But the point is that the capabilities of these computers are growing exponentially, and everyone is getting involved.

I asked Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang if this posed a threat to his model of providing specialized chips for artificial intelligence. “No, quantum processors will be added to computers in the future,” he replied.

One of the UK’s leaders in the field has identified what’s worth fighting for in the quantum world – the ability to eventually decrypt just about everything from state secrets to Bitcoin.

Sir Peter said: “All cryptocurrencies must also be re-examined due to the threat of quantum computing.”

One of Nvidia’s top partners said last year that while Bitcoin is still a few years away, the technology needs to evolve into a more robust blockchain by the end of the decade.

Tech industry sources refer to the process of “harvest now, decrypt later” to describe how state agencies preserve all the world’s encrypted data at home and abroad with the expectation that future generations will be able to access it.

Then there are competitions around the world. China’s approach differs significantly from U.S. and Western business competition.

Sir Peter said China’s total resources for quantum technology were around $15bn (£11bn), probably equal to all other government projects in the world combined.

China has published more quantum science papers than any other country since 2022, an effort led by physicist Pan Jianwei. This is an important part of Beijing’s “14th Five-Year Plan”.

China has decided to prevent technology companies such as Baidu and Alibaba from developing their own quantum research and centralize personnel and infrastructure into a single state-owned enterprise. China is trying to gain advantage in quantum communications and satellites.

Last year, Pan developed and tested the Zu Chongzhi 3.0 quantum computer using similar technology to Willow but a different approach and claimed to have obtained similar results. In the fall, it was opened for commercial use. It all feels a bit like the Manhattan Project of World War II that produced the first nuclear weapons, or the space race of the 21st century.

The UK is one of the scientific centers for quantum research. The first person to study superconducting qubits was a British scientist. There are dozens of companies and cutting-edge research here. The government plans to make significant investment in this in the coming weeks. It is vital for economics, military purposes, and geopolitics. The UK is expected to become the third power in this field.

Back in Willow’s lab, more existential questions may have been raised. Last year, Nevin proposed that Willow’s unprecedented speed supported some notion of the existence of a multiverse. Basically, this speed can be explained by Willow tapping into the computing power of parallel universes. Not all scientists believe this.

“There’s still a heated debate,” he told me. “As you learn when you visit the lab, the reason a quantum computer is so powerful is that it can hit anywhere from 2 to 105 combinations simultaneously in one clock cycle. It makes you wonder where are these different things? … There is a version of quantum mechanics worth thinking about—the many-worlds formulation—parallel universes or parallel realities.”

Nevin was careful to say that Willow had not proven this but “suggested that we should take the idea seriously”.

This is the frontier of the world, the frontier of technology, the frontier of growth, and the British government will soon be investing hundreds of millions of dollars to catch up with Willow and the Chinese. Sounds like science fiction. It is quickly becoming an economic fact.