Google has unveiled a computer chip capable of solving problems in minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 10 septillion years to complete.

The experimental quantum chip called Willow is not only extremely fast, but can also reduce errors exponentially. This is important because, according to Google, quantum computers currently cause exponential errors.

Hartmut Neven, the founder of Google Quantum AI said: “The more qubits we use in Willow, the more we reduce errors and the more quantum the system becomes.”

A “qubit” is a unit of information in quantum computing, like a “bit” in classical computing. It is described that the faster a system solves problems, the more “quantum rich” it becomes.

According to Google, the Willow quantum chip was developed in Santa Barbara in one of the few facilities in the world built from the ground up for this purpose.

To make such an advanced chip, the team behind Willow had to ensure that every element “worked well.”

“If a component is laggy or two components do not work well together, system performance will degrade,” Mr. Neven said in a blog post.

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The team tested Willow against an existing supercomputer using a test called the Random Circuit Sampling (RCS) benchmark.

If a quantum computer can’t beat a classical computer in achieving this benchmark, “there is strong reason to be skeptical about whether it can handle more complex quantum tasks,” says Neven.

Willow’s “amazing” achievement meant he performed a calculation in less than five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 10 septillion years, or 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years.

That’s thousands of billions of years – and longer than the age of the universe.

Quantum computing is currently still experimental. However, it is expected to speed up many processes in the future – from drug production to nuclear fusion research.

However, there are fears that the technology could also allow hackers to work more efficiently.

Google’s next step, Neven says, is to find a “first ‘useful, beyond-classical’ computation” – a task that a classical computer couldn’t handle, but that is useful in real life.