Inside the sub-zero lair of the world’s most powerful quantum computer

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

What I’m looking at is not just the most powerful computer in the world, but technology vital to financial security, Bitcoin, government secrets, the world economy, and more.

Quantum computing holds the key to what companies and countries will gain or lose for the rest of the 21st century.

Before me is Willow, suspended three feet high at a Google facility in Santa Barbara, California. Frankly, it wasn’t what I expected.

There’s no screen or keyboard, let alone holographic head cameras or brain-reading chips.

Willow is a series of oil-barrel-sized circular disks connected by hundreds of black control wires that lead down to a refrigerator bathed in bronze liquid helium that keeps the quantum microchip above absolute zero.

It looks and feels like something from the eighties, but if the potential of quantum is realized, the metal and wire jellyfish structure in front of me will transform the world in many ways.

“Welcome to our Quantum AI lab,” says Hartmut Neven, Google’s head of Quantum AI, as we pass through the high-security door.

Neven is a legendary figure, part tech genius, part techno music enthusiast; He dresses like he’s snowboarded here from the Burning Man music festival, for which he created art designs. Maybe it exists in a parallel universe; We will talk about this later.

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

A lot of our conversation is about what we’re 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 small advantage, from the shape of new components to companies in global supply chains, is a potential source of leverage.

This temple of high science has a Californian feel, notable for its art and color. Each quantum computer is given a name like Yakushima or Mendocino, each is covered in a piece of contemporary art, and a variety of graffiti-style murals adorn the walls illuminated by the bright winter sun.

Neven holds Willow, Google’s newest quantum chip, which has achieved two major milestones. This, he said, settles “in one fell swoop” the debate about whether quantum computers can do tasks that classical computers cannot.

Willow also solved in minutes a benchmark problem that would have taken the world’s best computer 10 septillion years, more than a trillion trillion or more than a computer with 25 trailing zeros, more than the age of the universe.

This theoretical result has recently been applied to the Quantum Echo algorithm, which helps learn the structure of molecules from the same technology used in MRI machines, which is impossible for conventional computers.

Neven says he believes this Willow quantum chip will be used “to help with many of the problems humanity has right now.”

“It will allow us to discover drugs more efficiently,” he says. “It will help us make food production more efficient, produce energy, transport energy, store energy, solve climate change and human hunger.”

“It allows us to understand nature much better and then demystify it to build technologies that will make life more enjoyable for all of us,” he tells me.

Some researchers believe that true Artificial Intelligence will only be truly possible with quantum.

Members of the team here recently received the Nobel Prize for original research on the “superconducting qubits” used here.

The Willow chip has 105 qubits. Microsoft’s quantum effort consists of 8 qubitsbut uses a different approach. The worldwide race is to reach 1 million qubits for a “utility-scale machine” that can perform quantum chemistry and drug design without errors. Technology is fragile.

What happens here is being watched carefully all over the world. Professor Sir Peter Knight, Chairman of the National Quantum Technology Programs Strategy Advisory Board, says Willow is breaking new ground.

“All machines are actually still in the toy model stage, they make mistakes. They need error correction. Willow was the first to show that error correction could be done through repeated rounds of repair, and that’s improving,” he says.

This puts the technology on a path to scale to accurately process trillions of transactions in perhaps seven or eight years, rather than the two decades previously assumed.

If the first quarter of this century was defined by the rise of the internet and then Artificial Intelligence, the next 25 years will surely mark the beginning of the quantum age.

Imagine trying to find a tennis ball in one of thousands of closed drawers. A conventional computer opens each one in turn. A quantum computer turns on all of these simultaneously. Or similarly, instead of needing a hundred keys to open a hundred doors in normal computing, quantum allows you to open a hundred doors with a single key.

These machines won’t be for everyone. They won’t shrink to phones, AI glasses, or laptops. But the thing is, the power of these computers is increasing exponentially, and everyone is getting into action.

I asked Nvidia chief Jensen Huang if this poses a threat to its model of providing specialized chips for AI. “No, a quantum processor will be added to a computer in the future,” he replied.

One of the UK’s leaders in this field points out what is up for grabs in the quantum world: the ultimate power to decrypt almost anything, from state secrets to Bitcoin.

“All cryptocurrencies will also need to be re-examined due to the threat of quantum computing,” says Sir Peter.

Last year, one of Nvidia’s leading partners said that although Bitcoin is still a few years away, the technology should transition to a stronger blockchain by the end of this decade.

Tech industry sources reference the “Harvest Now, Decrypt Later” process to explain how government agencies are believed to store all of the world’s encrypted data at home and abroad with the expectation that it will be accessible to future generations.

And then there is a race around the world. China’s approach is very different from the trade competition in the US and the West.

Sir Peter says the total funding allocated to quantum technology in China is around $15bn (£11bn), probably on par with all the rest of the world’s government programs put together.

Since 2022, China has published more scientific papers on quantum than any other country; these efforts are led by a pioneering physicist named Pan Jianwei. It is a key part of Beijing’s 14th five-year plan.

China has decided to stop tech companies such as Baidu and Alibaba from developing their own quantum research and concentrate people and infrastructure in a state-run enterprise. China is trying to gain the upper hand in quantum communications and satellites.

Last year, Pan developed and tested the Zuchongzhi 3.0 quantum computer using similar technology to Willow’s, with a different approach, and claimed to achieve similar results. It opened for commercial use in the fall. It all sounds a bit like the Manhattan Project in World War II, where the first nuclear weapons were produced, or the Space Race of the 21st Century.

The United Kingdom is one of the scientific centers of quantum research. The person who did the original research on superconducting qubits was a British scientist. There are dozens of companies and cutting-edge research here. The government plans to make a significant investment in this regard in the coming weeks. It is vital for economy, military use and geopolitics. There is hope that England will become the third power in this field.

Perhaps even more existential questions are being asked in the Willow lab. Last year, Neven suggested that Willow’s unprecedented speed supports some concept of the existence of a multiverse. Basically, this speed can be explained by Willow tapping into parallel universes for her computing power. Not all scientists bought it.

“There is still a heated debate,” he tells me. “As you learned on your visit to the lab, the reason quantum computers are so powerful is that they can tap anywhere from two to 105 combinations simultaneously within a clock cycle. This makes you question where are these different things?…There is one version of quantum mechanics to consider – the many-worlds formulation – parallel universes or parallel reality?”

Neven was careful to say that Willow doesn’t prove this, but “it does suggest that we should take this idea seriously.”

This is the cutting edge of the world, of technology, of growth, and the British government will soon be pouring hundreds of millions into catching up with Willow and the Chinese. It sounds like science fiction. It is rapidly becoming an economic reality.