Microsoft unveils new quantum computing hybrid solution in Azure

Microsoft is ready to bring quantum computing capabilities to its Azure software suite, introducing logical qubits alongside its artificial intelligence and high performance computing capabilities in a new full-stack solution that aims to tackle the most challenging scientific problems.

Announced on Tuesday, Azure Quantum features familiar cloud computing software in conjunction with quantum computing-specific hardware for Microsoft’s clients to leverage against problems classical machines struggle to handle.

“We are integrating quantum hardware architectures from our ecosystem partners with our quantum software, control, processing and error correction software — in addition to capabilities for copilot-assisted workflows, developer tools, classical supercomputing and multi-modal AI models,” Jason Zander, the executive vice president of strategic missions and technologies at Microsoft said. “This differentiated computing stack will pave the way for this new generation of hybrid applications.”

Azure Quantum employs logical qubits for its applications. Qubits are vital to the burgeoning quantum computing industry. The fundamental unit of data handled by theoretical quantum computers, qubits are fragile and difficult to coax into a quantum object, such as a photon of atom, in order to process as actionable information. 

Logical qubits are a set of entangled quantum objects that error-correct against noise and external disturbances that threaten their superposition state, promising highly accurate results for specific problems. 

But as the system leverages classical high performance computing in addition to quantum capabilities, it does not meet the threshold of a full fault-tolerant quantum computer, which has yet to be achieved.

Azure Quantum was born as a partnership between several companies, including: Microsoft, Atom Computing and Quantinuum. Quantinuum will bring enhanced qubit visualization capabilities to Azure Quantum, resulting in 12 entangled logical qubits –– the greatest amount of high-fidelity logical qubits on record, per Microsoft.

Using ion trapping and neutral atom hardware from Quantinuum and Atom Computing respectively, Microsoft integrated these qubits into its existing cloud computing and AI software to bring quantum computing applications to present problems in fields like chemistry, physics and life sciences. 

“It's really critical we have logical qubits to get solutions that are, after all, reliable,” Krysta Svore, a technical fellow for advanced quantum development at Microsoft told reporters during a Monday briefing. “Ultimately, we want deeper and deeper computation. We want to run more complex calculations with these reliable quantum computers. And so underneath this announcement, we've also been able to show for the first time, a combination of error correction and computation, which is critical.”

This was demonstrated to Microsoft researchers during a study on chemical reactions with chiral molecules. Svore noted that while this problem can still be solved on a classical machine, leveraging Azure Quantum’s abilities will help set a threshold to compare results from a quantum computing application to traditional computing.

Results from this demonstration can also be used as training feedback for the AI algorithms employed within Azure Quantum.

“Think of the quantum computer here as generating data to train an AI model on,” she said. 

Ultimately, Microsoft’s goal is to scale Azure Quantum to handle more complex, data-intensive problems that only a potential quantum machine can solve. The approach to achieve this is to eventually incorporate 50 logical qubits in Azure Quantum.

Experts within the quantum information sciences realm note that the debut of Azure Quantum is a significant step in bringing new types of hybrid quantum computing solutions to market.

“We see this year’s recent advances in error correction and fault tolerance as major developments in the field, especially for the potential to enable new types of quantum computing applications,” Travis Humble, the director of the Quantum Science Center at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, told Nextgov/FCW.

Editor's note: This article has been updated to reflect the partnerships behind Azure Quantum.