Microsoft Quantum opens a research center in Maryland to support DARPA quantum computing testing.
A year ago, Microsoft Quantum committed to building a quantum research center in Maryland. That facility is now open in Discovery District Maryland, and the company is extending its commitment through new research and training partnerships.
As advances in AI and quantum accelerate scientific discovery, the ability to bring together talent, skills, infrastructure, and execution is becoming increasingly important. Microsoft's partnership with Maryland is focused on creating an environment where new ideas can move more quickly from research to implementation.
With support from Governor Wes Moore's Capital of Quantum Initiative, Maryland acquired and renovated the Discovery Center. Microsoft then worked with UMD and the Capital of Quantum Initiative to design a 15,000 square foot quantum research center within that space. Over the past year, this collaboration has built dedicated areas for Microsoft's proprietary research, space for DARPA's topological system and future prototypes, labs and offices for partner companies, and a community-focused training laboratory. The facility is capable of supporting quantum research, partner integration, workforce development, and government engagement.
The partner space supports different kinds of relationships. Companies that build quantum technology can work with Microsoft to integrate their machines or components with the Microsoft Quantum platform, while developers and end-users can work with Microsoft to understand how the platform can impact their missions. This integrated design helps Microsoft support partners in scaling their technologies and accelerating quantum computing's impact for customers.
**Microsoft's Delivery to DARPA**
Microsoft is designing quantum computers for utility scale—systems required to solve problems with real value beyond the capability of classical computers. DARPA is an ideal partner because its test and evaluation team brings expertise across the computing stack, from hardware and controls to software and applications. DARPA will have full access to Microsoft's latest topological system on site.
This delivery follows the announcement of Majorana 2, Microsoft's second-generation topological quantum computing chip, which uses a new material stack that replaces aluminum with lead for increased performance. Making a system available for independent testing is an important step in evaluating the company's approach toward a large-scale, economically relevant quantum computer.
Microsoft 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 DARPA's broader Quantum Benchmarking Initiative. The evaluation effort brings together the Air Force Research Laboratory, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, and national laboratories including Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, Lawrence Berkeley, and Lawrence Livermore. Maryland's investment and local talent provide the federal collaboration with a direct interaction point for Microsoft hardware.
**Learning by Doing**
Microsoft's research center will feature a quantum hardware makerspace where industry, academia, and government can collaborate on new approaches to hands-on quantum training. Microsoft's initial partners include AMD, Bluefors, Intel, IQM, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), Riverlane, and Quantum Motion, whose collective contributions will give learners access to real hardware and the expertise behind it. Students, researchers, educators, and those transitioning into quantum from other fields will work on open-ended projects alongside community experts.
Microsoft believes these hands-on experiences are vital to training the next generation, in collaboration with UMD and other community partners. The company's work with Fermilab extends beyond training: Microsoft is collaborating to broaden the applicability of quantum-control technologies across hardware platforms. Concurrently, Microsoft is working with UMD to explore how tools such as Fermilab's Quantum Instrumentation Control Kit (QICK) can be incorporated into education.
Unlike quantum education efforts that focus primarily on theory or software, this initiative emphasizes experiential learning across the quantum hardware stack. Participants will develop critical thinking skills by deciding which designs are worth building, determining what to measure, and troubleshooting unexpected results. They will assemble parts to create small-scale but real quantum computers from leading companies in quantum and computing. As AI expands what can be explored, execution and intuition about what to build will matter more than ever. Microsoft's goal is for the lessons, educational content, and collaborative model pioneered in Maryland to serve as a scalable framework for quantum hardware workforce development.
**Cultivating a Measurement-Based Quantum Community**
Microsoft is a world leader in measurement-based quantum computing, an approach the company views as an enabler of large, useful machines. For eighteen years, Microsoft has tackled the hardest problems in quantum information science, with impact in topological quantum computing, quantum error correction, new atomistic material stacks, and measurement-based computing. When measurement results determine what happens next, their speed and fidelity become part of the computer's architecture, shaping the error-correcting codes that can be used and how to verify that a computation has done what was intended.
Microsoft is beginning an annual workshop series to further accelerate this research community across multiple qubit types, with goals of pushing the limits of measurement speed and accuracy while developing new error-correcting codes and verification and validation protocols for measurement-based computing.
The company will also fund quantum postdoctoral positions at UMD to support research in areas of mutual interest to university faculty and Microsoft Quantum. Together, these commitments enable the company to develop new ideas with Maryland's researchers and extend Microsoft's collaboration beyond the work already taking place in the center.
**Building the World's Computer**
Microsoft builds the world's computer, and the company is bringing the same model to quantum, incorporating partner technologies throughout the computing stack as it does in its cloud computers. The goal is simple to state and hard to do: offer customers the best quantum computers, high-performance computing, and AI available at every stage of the journey to useful quantum computing, through an ecosystem of end users, companies, universities, nonprofits, and government agencies.
The Microsoft Quantum platform spans developer tools through a real-time operating system for quantum computers in Azure, with support for different qubit technologies. This shared software and infrastructure helps partner machines scale faster while allowing researchers to co-design systems around customers' most demanding workloads—a contrast with developing hardware first and only then determining which applications it might serve.
With Atom Computing, Microsoft is applying its platform's quantum error correction to neutral atoms to build the world's most powerful quantum computers. The first machine, Magne, is planned to have fifty logical qubits and is slated for operation by QuNorth in Denmark by early 2027. The Microsoft Quantum Development Kit, included in the platform, provides developer-facing tools for quantum programming, error correction, chemistry, and other applications. Its latest addition is a private-preview analytics library: an emerging collection of quantum algorithms and data-science tooling for advanced analytics and large-scale data analysis.
**The Pace of Science Is Changing**
AI is changing the range of questions that can be pursued. For example, the Microsoft Quantum team can now explore hardware architectures in a week that previously would have taken a year or more to analyze. Being able to compare more alternatives before committing to a design alters what is possible, but it also makes the connection to experimental infrastructure more important—people and equipment that can turn a promising architecture into something that can be built and measured are now essential.
Microsoft Discovery, an enterprise agentic AI platform for research and development, and the company's $60 million investment in the Department of Energy's Genesis Mission, are complementary efforts to accelerate science. The opportunity extends beyond individual research teams to the places that can combine these new tools with the skills, infrastructure, and execution pace needed to use them effectively.
Maryland has demonstrated what can be built in a year when state investment, university talent, federal expertise, and industry work toward a shared goal. Stakeholders must keep that partnership adaptable, developing new ways to work together as technology changes. Maryland has established itself as the place where quantum computing ideas can be conceived, tested, and implemented through collaboration.