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SuperconductingEst. 1998Santa Barbara, California

Google

Google Quantum AI

The first to claim quantum supremacy.

Claimed the first 'quantum supremacy' moment and is now building error-corrected logical qubits with its Willow chip.

The First Quantum Supremacy Claim

In 2019 Google's Sycamore chip did in 200 seconds what a supercomputer would need 10,000 years for.

Led by Hartmut Neven

The Story

Timeline.

2014

Google Quantum AI lab founded, hiring John Martinis's team from UCSB.

2019

Sycamore runs a task in 200 seconds a classical supercomputer would need 10,000 years for.

2023

Publishes evidence that scaling up reduces logical error rates — a milestone for error correction.

2024

Willow chip demonstrates 'below threshold' error correction — errors decrease as qubits grow.

2025

Willow completes a benchmark in 5 minutes that would take classical hardware 10 septillion years.

What makes them different

Key Facts

  • First company to publicly demonstrate quantum supremacy.
  • First to show exponential error suppression with a logical qubit.
  • Owns the entire stack: cryogenics, control electronics, chip fab, software.
  • Cirq is its open-source Python framework for algorithm research.

Real-world pilots

Quantum Uses Today

  • Physics simulations of exotic phases of matter.
  • Quantum error correction research at production scale.
  • Machine learning experiments on hybrid quantum-classical models.

If they succeed

Potential Applications

  • Fault-tolerant machines capable of running Shor's algorithm.
  • AI models with quantum-accelerated training on specialized tasks.
  • Simulating high-energy physics and cosmology.
  • Designing new pharmaceuticals from first principles.