Microsoft executive Todd Holmdahl has led teams to invent profitable new computing hardware products before. His latest project is his first with a chance of hauling in a Nobel Prize in physics as well as new revenue if it succeeds.

Holmdahl previously oversaw the hardware design of the Xbox and Xbox360 consoles, which rake in billions for Microsoft each year. Late last year he was appointed the leader of a swelling band of mathematicians, physicists, and engineers trying to add mighty computers powered by quantum physics to Microsoft’s menu of cloud computing services. Holmdahl speaks about quantum computing like a tech executive would a new line of business, not a speculative physics or R&D project.

“I am personally competitive, and my whole history is producing products,” he says. “We have line of sight to a commercial product.”

A quick glance at competing projects in quantum computing makes that kind of talk surprising. Google, IBM, and even some startups have already demonstrated prototype hardware capable of crunching data (see “10 Breakthrough Technologies: Practical Quantum Computing”). Microsoft isn’t yet close.

Holmdahl’s crew is chasing a different approach to quantum hardware based on manipulating a subatomic particle called the Majorana fermion, which the physics community isn’t 100 percent sure has ever been seen. It’s named after the man who predicted its existence, Italian physicist Ettore Majorana, who in 1938 emptied his bank account, caught a ferry, and disappeared without a trace.

While Google and IBM work on their next prototypes, Microsoft’s physicists are trying to build the first device that can conclusively isolate and encode a single digital bit of data with the particle Majorana predicted. Yet Holmdahl resists the suggestion that this means his company is unlikely to be first to market. “I think we actually will be,” he says.

Todd Holmdahl Courtesy of MSFT

Finicky hardware

Quantum computers are built out of devices known as qubits, which represent data using physics only apparent at very tiny scales. Tech companies and investors have sunk millions into the technology, because at the quantum scale, particles and information can do things that are flat out impossible in our human-sized reality. This means some calculations that would take centuries on a conventional computer can be done in seconds on a quantum computer. Google and others hope to use quantum computers to power up machine learning, and renting them out to solve problems in chemistry and materials science (see “Chemists Are First in Line for Quantum Computing’s Benefits”).

The catch is that although qubits can be built in various ways—the most advanced are based on superconducting metal circuits or metal ions floating inside magnetic fields—they are all unreliable because quantum states are so delicate. This month IBM announced the biggest chip made by the companies in the race for a general-purpose quantum computer—a chip with just 17 qubits. To do useful work, a quantum computer would likely need many thousands or millions of the devices.