Microsoft, on 22 September 2026, said it had opened a quantum research center in Maryland's Discovery District, with the University of Maryland. With support from Governor Wes Moore's Capital of Quantum Initiative, the state acquired and renovated the Discovery Center. Microsoft then worked with the university and that initiative to design a 15,000 square foot research center inside it, including space for DARPA's system and for future prototypes.

In that center, Microsoft says it is providing topological qubits, built on a chip called Majorana 2, for independent testing by DARPA, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. A qubit is the quantum version of a bit. Topological is the field's word for a qubit whose protection is supposed to come from the material's structure. Majorana 2 is the second generation of that chip. They say the new version replaces aluminum with lead, for higher performance.

A hand holding a gold-framed chip labeled Majorana 2, with a Microsoft logo on the board.
Majorana 2, the chip named on the page. Microsoft's photograph.

DARPA, they write, will have full access to the latest topological system on site. They call DARPA an ideal partner because its test and evaluation team brings expertise from hardware and controls to software and applications. They say that access is an important step in evaluating their approach toward a large-scale and economically relevant quantum computer.

Microsoft says it is one of the first companies to advance to the final stage of DARPA's Underexplored Systems for Utility-Scale Quantum Computing program, part of the Quantum Benchmarking Initiative. Utility scale, on this page, means a machine that can solve problems of real value beyond what a non-quantum computer can do. The evaluation, they write, brings in the Air Force Research Laboratory, the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, and the national laboratories at Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, Lawrence Berkeley, and Lawrence Livermore.

The page does not include a measurement from that test. It announces the access. The same page also describes the building, a hardware training shop, and funded research jobs at the university. Those are not the subject here.