Microsoft & Quantinuum: 12 Logical Qubits + First Hybrid Chemistry Simulation

Microsoft and Quantinuum tripled their record to 12 LQ on Quantinuum's 56-qubit H2, with a 22× improvement over base error rates. Two LQ drove the world's first end-to-end quantum-AI-HPC chemistry simulation, estimating an iron catalyst's ground-state energy within chemical accuracy.

In September 2024, Microsoft and Quantinuum tripled their prior logical qubit record: 12 highly reliable LQ on Quantinuum's updated 56-qubit H2 system (4.7:1 resource-to-logical overhead). The 12 LQ entangled in a GHZ state achieved a circuit error rate of 0.0011 — 22× better than the base error rate of 0.024.

On a subset of 8 LQ: 5 successive rounds of quantum error correction were combined simultaneously with logical entangling operations — the first demonstration on record of computation and error correction beneficially combined (8 LQ circuit error rate: 0.002, 11× over base 0.023).

First-ever end-to-end hybrid quantum-AI-HPC chemistry workflow: 2 LQ on Quantinuum's H1 prepared the ground state of an iron catalyst active space. Classical shadow measurements fed an AI model (via Azure Quantum Elements HPC) to estimate the ground-state energy within chemical accuracy (≤1.6 mHa of the true value) — outperforming the same calculation on physical qubits.