What Google’s Willow means for supercomputing and you

Google has claimed that ‘Willow,’ its new quantum computing chip, can solve a math equation in five minutes that the fastest supercomputers would take 10 septillion years to do. Experts say that though supercomputers could potentially revolutionise fields such as medicine, battery technology, materials science, financial modelling and Artificial Intelligence in the future, their benefits are years if not decades away Google has unveiled a new quantum computing chip. Ten septillion years is larger than the age of the universe “Introducing Willow, our new state-of-the-art quantum computing chip with a breakthrough that can reduce errors exponentially as we scale up using more qubits, cracking a 30-year challenge in the field,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai wrote on X. Hartmut Neven, head of Google’s Quantum AI Lab, called Willow “the best quantum processor built to date.” “It’s like moving from a single-engine airplane to a four-engine aircraft—safer and more reliable,” Neven told BBC.