The man behind Microsoft’s decadeslong quest to build a quantum computer

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. A Microsoft executive made a compelling pitch to mountaineer and physics professor Chetan Nayak in 2000: Join the Redmond, Wash., company and together they would scale nearby Mount Rainier—and build a quantum computer. He summited Washington’s highest peak within two years.

But the climb toward a workable quantum device continues. Nearly all major tech companies are working to build a practical quantum computer, which they hope will enable leaps forward in fields such as encryption and medicine. Rather than using classical bits that are either zero or one, quantum computing employs a type of bit known as a qubit that can exist in both states at the same time.

This helps qubits to process more information than today’s computers and to perform certain calculations exponentially faster. Nayak leads a team at Microsoft that consists of several hundred chemists, engineers and mathematicians who have been trying to build a quantum computer for about 20 years. The group, called Station Q, is taking an approach that is riskier and less widely accepted than approaches employed at rivals such as Alphabet’s Google.

If it pays off, Microsoft could vault to the front of the industry and disprove numerous doubters in the tech industry and scientific community. Last month, Microsoft announced that it had created a chip capable of producing a long-elusive particle known as a Majorana that could form the basis for a useful quantum computer, a breakthrough they said could shorten the arrival of a quantum device to years, rather than decades. While some physicists expressed doubt that Microsoft’s claims would survive their scrutiny, Chief Executive Satya Nadella appeared thrilled to have something to