Google says it achieved breakthrough in quantum computing

Posted: Oct 23, 2019 / 11:24 PM EDT / Updated: Oct 23, 2019 / 11:24 PM EDT

FILE – This July 19, 2016, file photo shows the Google logo at the company’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. Employee activism and outside pressure have pushed big tech companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Google promising to slash their carbon emissions. But there’s another thing these tech giants aren’t cutting: Their growing business ties to the oil and gas industry. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez, File)

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) – Google says it has achieved a breakthrough in blazingly fast quantum computing.

Google says it developed an experimental processor that took just minutes to complete a calculation that would take the world’s best supercomputer thousands of years. Big tech companies including Microsoft, IBM and Intel are avidly pursuing quantum computing, for vastly sped-up information processing.

While conventional computing relies on bits, or pieces of data that bear either a one or zero, quantum computing employs quantum bits, or qubits, that contain values of one and zero simultaneously.