Beijing / 28 Dec 2025: Chinese scientists have achieved a major breakthrough in quantum computing, becoming the first team outside the United States — and the second in the world — to cross a critical stability milestone needed for practical quantum computers. Their success with the Zuchongzhi 3.2 superconducting quantum system marks significant progress toward scalable, real-world quantum machines.

Why this matters:
Quantum computers use quantum bits (qubits) that can exist in multiple states simultaneously, enabling them to tackle problems far beyond the reach of today’s fastest supercomputers. However, qubits are extremely sensitive to environmental disturbances — such as temperature changes and electrical noise — causing errors that cripple computation.

To overcome this, scientists use quantum error correction, a system that detects and fixes errors during computation. But traditional approaches often introduce more errors than they eliminate unless the system reaches a critical “fault-tolerance threshold” — a key benchmark that indicates stable and reliable quantum operation at scale.

The breakthrough:

• The Chinese team, led by Pan Jianwei at the University of Science and Technology of China, successfully pushed their Zuchongzhi 3.2 processor beyond the fault-tolerance threshold, meaning error correction now reduces overall errors rather than increasing them — a decisive shift toward practical quantum computing.
• This result places China alongside the United States as a leader in quantum stability milestones. According to scientists, the Chinese approach may be more efficient than one used by rivals like Google, because it relies on microwave-based control rather than adding complex hardware to suppress errors.

How it works:
Instead of simply adding more qubits to spread information (which can inadvertently create more opportunities for errors), the Chinese method uses an advanced microwave control scheme. This reduces quantum leaks and improves the fidelity of computations without heavy hardware complexity — potentially making expansion easier and less resource-intensive.

Implications for the future:
Achieving fault-tolerant error correction is widely seen as a pivotal step toward building quantum computers that can solve real-world problems reliably — from drug discovery and materials science to climate modeling and cryptography. Although fully commercial quantum computers are still years away, milestones like this narrow the gap between theoretical promise and engineering reality.

Experts say that continued advances in quantum stability and error correction could soon propel quantum systems into practical deployment, reshaping industries and accelerating breakthroughs in science and technology.