Microsoft’s Quantum Chief Doesn’t Care If Skeptical Scientists Believe His Majorana Claims
The executive heading up Microsoft’s multi-billion dollar push to build a functional quantum computer says he has no interest in pacifying critical researchers in the field. Last year, when Zulfi Alam’s team announced they had effectively split an electron to create the long-sought Majorana quasiparticles — a core milestone in the company’s plan to reimagine modern computing — many scientists flat-out rejected the tech giant’s claim. Critics pointed to inconclusive, ambiguous data in Microsoft’s research papers, plus the fact that most of the team’s key results have never gone through full independent peer review. But Alam, Microsoft’s corporate vice president leading its quantum division, laughed off the pushback when speaking to WIRED: “I don’t really care.”
Microsoft is among a handful of tech giants locked in a high-stakes race alongside dozens of startups to build the first commercially viable quantum computer. The end goal for these companies is a machine that leverages the counterintuitive rules of quantum mechanics to process information in a way fundamentally different from traditional classical computers. This would unlock solutions to currently impossible problems spanning everything from novel drug development to national defense. (The technology also carries widespread concerns that powerful quantum computers could be used to crack most current standard encryption.)
Companies are pursuing a wide range of strategies to build quantum bits (“qubits” for short), with designs relying on neutral atoms, charged ions, and photons all in active development. While Microsoft’s unique Majorana-based approach holds strong theoretical promise, the quasiparticles themselves — first predicted nearly 90 years ago — have proven incredibly difficult to confirm and isolate. The company’s long-running Majorana research effort has also been dogged by repeated controversy.
Last year’s claimed breakthrough was met with sharp skepticism from the broader research community, because independent scientists have not been able to rule out that other common physical phenomena (not Majoranas) produced the signals Microsoft used to draw its conclusion. The controversy dates back further: in 2021, Microsoft retracted a high-profile Majorana paper published in Nature after independent physicists flagged critical flaws in the team’s data analysis. This past June, the company announced it had developed a new qubit 1,000 times more reliable than its previous iteration, built with the help of Microsoft’s AI-powered scientific discovery agent. But researchers still question the Majorana-based work that underpins this latest claim, because Microsoft continues to refuse to release the raw data behind its results.
Alam pushes back on that demand, asking rhetorically: “Why should I?” He argues the work’s high commercial sensitivity means his team cannot release the granular, detailed data researchers are requesting. He also criticizes traditional academic publishing as far too slow, noting that a paper Microsoft published in Nature this June was based on research the team completed two full years earlier.
“The world has changed in two years, so this idea that we have to wait for peer reviews and publications just doesn’t work in a field moving this fast right now,” Alam says, adding he believes there are too few experts with the right background to speed up the traditional review process. “That’s why this whole paper thing is kind of boring now.”
That explanation has done little to satisfy critical members of the scientific community. “The field is growing, there are a lot of experts outside of these big companies that are able to reliably assess claims and scientific work,” says physicist Trevor Lanting, chief development officer at publicly traded quantum computing firm D-Wave Quantum — a company that has itself faced accusations of overstating its technical progress.
Having claims evaluated through independent scientific review “is part of the healthy process of really establishing the science and the technical foundation for the technology,” Lanting adds. “So when a company or group says they don’t have time, I would read that as ‘our results aren’t strong enough to stand up to that scrutiny.’”
Alam remains unpersuaded that he needs to prove his work to outside observers — even after taking the time to sketch a diagram of his team’s approach in a WIRED reporter’s notebook. Instead, he says he plans to win over skeptical academics by delivering a working, functional quantum computer. Microsoft has publicly pledged it will launch a commercially useful quantum computer by 2029.
Criticism from the research community just “motivates us to be even faster,” he says. “Because our mission is black-and-white: Get this machine up and let the machine do the work.”
