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

It looks like a golden chandelier and has the coolest place in the universe.

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

Quantum computing holds the key to how companies and nations will win – and lose – the rest of the 21st Century.

In front of me is suspended a meter in the air, in a Google facility in Santa Barbara California, Willow. To be honest, it wasn’t what I expected.

No screens or keyboards, let alone holographic head cams or brain-reading chips.

Willow is an oil barrel-sized series of round discs connected by hundreds of black control wires that descend into a bronze liquid helium bath refrigerator that stores the Quantum microchip one thousandth of a degree above absolute zero.

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

“Welcome to our Quantum AI lab,” said Hartmut Neven, Google’s Quantum chief, as we walked through the tall security door.

Neven is a legendary figure, part tech genius, part techno music enthusiast, dressed as he snowboards here straight from the Burning Man music festival – where he designs art. Maybe he has, in a parallel universe – more on that later.

His mission is to turn theoretical physics into functional quantum computers “to solve unsolvable problems” and he admits that he is biased but says that these chandeliers are the best performers in the world.

Most of our conversation was about what we weren’t allowed to film in this restricted lab. This critical technology is subject to export controls, secrecy and is at the heart of a race for commercial and economic supremacy. Any small advantage, from the form of new ingredients to companies in global supply chains, is a source of potential leverage.

There is a distinctly Californian vibe to this temple of high science, in its art and color. Each quantum computer is given a name like Yakushima or Mendocino, each of them is wrapped in a piece of contemporary art, and various graffiti style murals adorn the walls illuminated by the bright winter sun.

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

Willow also solved a benchmark problem in minutes that took the world’s best computer 10 septillion years, so more than a trillion trillion, or one with 25 zeros at the end, more than the age of the universe.

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

However the ways he believes this Willow quantum chip can be used “to help with a lot of problems that humanity has today”.

“This will enable us to discover drugs more efficiently,” he said. “It helps us to make food more efficiently, it helps us to produce energy, to transport energy, to store energy..solving climate change and human hunger…”

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

Some researchers believe that actual Artificial Intelligence will only be possible in Quantum.

The team members here recently received the Nobel prize for the original research on the “superconducting qubits” used here.

The Willow chip has 105 qubits. Microsoft’s quantum effort has 8 qubitsbut uses a different approach. The race around the world is to get 1 million qubits for a “utility scale machine” that can do quantum chemistry, drug design, without error. Technology is fragile.

What is happening here is well watched in the whole world. Professor Sir Peter Knight, Chair of the National Quantum Technology Programs Strategy Advisory Board, says Willow is breaking new ground.

“All machines are really still in the toy model stage, they make mistakes. They need error correction. Willow is the first to show that you can do error correction, through iterative fixes, that get better,” he said.

This puts the technology on a path to scale to accurately perform a trillion operations, perhaps within seven or eight years, rather than the two decades previously believed.

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 be the beginning of the Quantum era.

Imagine trying to find a tennis ball in one of a thousand closed draws. A classical computer opens each one in turn. A quantum computer unlocks all of them at the same time. Or similarly, instead of needing a hundred keys to open a hundred doors in normal computing, quantum enables you to open all a hundred, with one key, instantly.

These machines are not for everyone. They will not be reduced to phones or AI glasses or laptops. But the point is that the power of these computers is growing rapidly, and everything is starting to move.

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

And one of the UK’s leaders in the field is hinting at what the quantum world will gain – the ultimate power to decrypt almost anything from state secrets to Bitcoin.

All cryptocurrency also needs to be re-examined because of the threat of quantum computing,” said Sir Peter.

A top Nvidia partner last year said that while Bitcoin still has a few years to go, the technology should fork into a more stable blockchain by the end of the decade.

Technology industry sources refer to the process of “Harvest Now, Decrypt Later” to describe how state agencies are believed to be saving all the world’s encrypted data at home and abroad with the expectation that future generations will be able to access it.

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

At around $15bn (£11bn), the total resources committed to quantum technology in China are possibly on the order of all other government programs in the world combined, Sir Peter said.

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

China has decided to stop tech companies like Baidu and Alibaba from doing their own quantum research – and focus people and infrastructure on a state-run enterprise. China is trying to get the edge on quantum communications and satellites.

Last year, Jianwei developed and tested the Zuchongzhi 3.0 quantum computer using the same technology although Willow’s method was different, claiming similar results. In the fall it was opened for commercial use. Everything seems a little like the World War II Manhattan Project to produce the first nuclear weapon, or the Space Race of the 21st Century.

The UK is one of the scientific heartlands for quantum research. This is a British scientist who did the original research on superconducting qubits. There are many companies and research trends here. The government plans to make a significant investment in this regard in the coming weeks. It is important for the economy, for military use, and for geopolitics. There is hope that the UK will become a third power in this area.

Back in Willow’s lab, there may be more questions to be asked. Last year Neven suggested that Willow’s unprecedented speed supports some concepts of the existence of a multiverse. Basically this speed can be explained by Willow tapping into parallel universes for its computing power. Not all scientists bought it.

“There was a lively debate,” he told me. “As you learned during your visit to the lab, the reason the quantum computer is so powerful is that within one clock cycle it can touch 2 to 105 combinations simultaneously. This makes you question where these different things are?… There is a version of quantum mechanics to think about – the many worlds formulation – parallel universes or parallel reality.”

Willow couldn’t prove it, Neven was careful to say, but “suggested 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. Sounds like science fiction…it’s fast becoming economic reality.