Microsoft opens Azure quantum platform for developers

At its Build developer conference, the company said on Tuesday that developers will be able to take advantage of nearly two decades of quantum research infused into every layer of the Azure Quantum stack.

The developers will get access to an open ecosystem of diverse quantum software, hardware and solutions from Microsoft and its partners 1QBit, Honeywell, IonQ, and QCI.

They will have an ability to have quantum impact with pre-built solutions that run on classical computers (what Microsoft refers to as quantum-inspired solutions).

While Microsoft is yet to publically announce a quantum supercomputer, Google has built a quantum computer that is way ahead than world's top supercomputers in calculation - solving tasks in nearly three minutes that would otherwise take current supercomputers 10,000 years to achieve.

Researchers at Microsoft are currently busy writing the software to build a scalable computer that will help humanity unlock solutions to problems in areas such as clean energy, global warming, materials design and much more - including solving the mysteries of our universe.

If all goes well, Microsoft is confident about having one such scalable super machine within the next five years.

Based on quantum bits, the computer will not use classical bits but qubits which are not limited to binary and can have properties of 0 and 1 simultaneously, thus trying every possible number and sequence simultaneously to unlock vast amounts of data.

The current bits in computers store information as either 1 or 0, thus limiting the potential to make sense when faced with gigantic volumes of data.