Google’s Quantum chip claims 13,000x speed advantage over supercomputers

Google Quantum AI has demonstrated what it describes as a verifiable quantum advantage — running a new algorithm on quantum hardware that outperforms classical supercomputers by a factor of 13,000.

The breakthrough, announced on Wednesday, marks the first time a quantum computer has executed a verifiable algorithm with real-world applications, potentially accelerating enterprise workloads in computational chemistry, molecular modeling, and materials engineering that are currently constrained by classical computing limitations.

The achievement centers on Google’s Willow quantum chip, a 105-qubit superconducting processor, executing what the company calls its Quantum Echoes algorithm, technically an out-of-time-order correlator (OTOC), a method for measuring how disturbances spread through quantum systems.

“This is the first time in history that any quantum computer has successfully run a verifiable algorithm that surpasses the ability of supercomputers,” Google said in a statement announcing the breakthrough, which was also published in Nature.

Unlike previous quantum milestones that demonstrated computational power on abstract problems, Google emphasized that this marks a practical shift.

“Quantum verifiability means the result can be repeated on our quantum computer — or any other of the same caliber — to get the same answer, confirming the result,” the statement explained, distinguishing reproducible quantum computing from experimental demonstrations.

The company specified that the 13,000x performance advantage refers to the OTOC algorithm running on Willow compared to “the best classical algorithm on one of the world’s fastest supercomputers,” though it did not identify which specific supercomputer served as the benchmark.

The announcement positions Google ahead in the intensifying quantum race. IBM is targeting a 200-logical-qubit system called Starling by 2029, while Microsoft, in February 2025, introduced its Majorana 1 chip based on topological qubits, claiming a path to one million qubits on a single chip. Similarly, IonQ, using trapped ion technology, had demonstrated a 12% speed advantage over classical supercomputers in medical device simulation in March 2025.

How the algorithm works and its applications

The Quantum Echoes algorithm sends precisely crafted signals through Willow’s quantum system, perturbing a single qubit, then reversing the signal’s evolution. “We send a carefully crafted signal into our quantum system (qubits on Willow chip), perturb one qubit, then precisely reverse the signal’s evolution to listen for the ‘echo’ that comes back,” Google explained.

“This quantum echo is special because it gets amplified by constructive interference — a phenomenon where quantum waves add up to become stronger. This makes our measurement incredibly sensitive,” the statement added.

In a proof-of-principle experiment with the University of California, Berkeley, researchers analyzed molecular structures with 15 and 28 atoms using Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) data. “The results on our quantum computer matched those of traditional NMR, and revealed information not usually available from NMR, which is a crucial validation of our approach,” Google said.

“Quantum computing-enhanced NMR could become a powerful tool in drug discovery, helping determine how potential medicines bind to their targets, or in materials science for characterizing the molecular structure of new materials like polymers, battery components, or even the materials that comprise our quantum bits,” the announcement stated.

For enterprises, the implications extend to organizations developing advanced materials, batteries for electric vehicles, or next-generation semiconductors. However, Google provided no timeline for commercial deployment.

Technical foundation behind the breakthrough

The algorithmic achievement rests on Willow’s exceptional hardware performance. “Across its entire 105-qubit array, it features fidelities of 99.97% for single-qubit gates, 99.88% for entangling gates, and 99.5% for readout, all operating at an unmatched speed of tens to hundreds of nanoseconds,” Google stated.

The research team conducted one trillion measurements throughout the project. “This speed was instrumental in enabling a staggering one trillion measurements over the course of this project—a significant portion of all measurements ever performed on all quantum computers combined,” the company said.

The announcement came six years after Google’s 2019 quantum supremacy claim, which generated controversy when IBM researchers argued the problem could be solved on classical hardware in days rather than millennia. No such classical computing counterclaim has emerged yet for the Quantum Echoes demonstration.

Roadmap progress and remaining challenges

Wednesday’s announcement represented the latest milestone in Google’s quantum roadmap. The company achieved beyond-classical quantum computation in 2019, demonstrated quantum error correction in 2023, and showed below-threshold error correction with Willow in 2024.

“Today’s demonstration of the first-ever verifiable quantum advantage with our Quantum Echoes algorithm marks a significant step toward the first real-world applications of quantum computing,” Google said in the statement. The company’s next milestone targets a long-lived logical qubit, the statement added. However, formidable engineering challenges remain. “Reaching our ultimate goal will require orders-of-magnitude improvement in system performance and scale, with millions of components to be developed and matured,” the statement said.