Google Quantum AI
Superconducting · Founded 2012 · Santa Barbara, CA · Public (GOOGL)
Quieter roadmap than IBM but milestone delivery has been substantive: Sycamore (2019), Willow (2024). Targets long-term FTQC by ~2030. Marketing language sometimes overstates ('quantum supremacy', 'below threshold') but the underlying experiments are real.
Delivered
3
Late
1
Missed
0
Softened
1
Pending
3
Delivery rate (excluding pending): 72%
Our verdict
Google's hardware achievements are real — Willow's below-threshold demonstration is the most consequential 2024 result in QC. Their marketing layer is loose: 'quantum supremacy', '10²⁵ years', etc., are framings that will not survive in their original form. Read the Nature papers; ignore the blog post taglines. The long-term roadmap to FTQC by ~2030 is aspirational; nobody knows whether the engineering scales.
Claims by target year
Target: 2019 · Announced 2018
Demonstrate quantum supremacy
Outcome: Sycamore (53 qubits) sampling experiment published Oct 2019. The 'supremacy' framing was challenged within years by tensor-network classical methods (Pan & Zhang 2022, others); the underlying experiment stands.
Target: 2023 · Announced 2020
Demonstrate error suppression below threshold
Outcome: Achieved below-threshold error correction with surface code on Willow in 2024, one year late. Logical error suppressed by 2× when going from distance-3 to distance-5 and again 2× to distance-7.
Target: 2024 · Announced 2020
Willow: 105-qubit chip with high coherence
Outcome: Willow released December 2024 with T₁ ≈ 100 µs and 6×10⁻³ 2-qubit error.
Target: 2024
Random circuit sampling result claimed 10²⁵ years classical equivalent
Outcome: Willow RCS result published December 2024; the 'years equivalent' framing has been criticized as not accounting for state-of-the-art tensor-network simulation. Original Sycamore 2019 claim of 10,000 years was eaten by Pan & Zhang (2022) within 3 years.
Target: 2024 · Announced 2023
Suppress logical error exponentially with code distance
Outcome: Demonstrated on Willow December 2024 (Acharya et al., Nature 2024).
Target: 2026 · Announced 2024
Long-lived logical qubit (memory) with >1 hr lifetime
Target: 2028 · Announced 2024
Demonstrate first useful, beyond-classical computation on a long-lived logical qubit
Target: 2030 · Announced 2024
Build a useful, error-corrected quantum computer
Last verified: 2026-05-24