Google Quantum AI announced Thursday that its magic state cultivation technique reduced errors by roughly 40 times on its Willow chip, achieving a record logical fidelity of 99.99%. Producing these states accounts for up to 95% of a quantum computer’s total capacity, making it a major bottleneck. This breakthrough makes the timeline more plausible for when a quantum computer could break RSA-2048 encryption with under one million noisy qubits, versus the 20 million estimated in 2019. The cost to break Bitcoin’s elliptic curve cryptography is estimated at fewer than 500,000 physical qubits. However, factoring an RSA-2048 key would require magic states with errors around one in 10 billion, roughly a million times cleaner than what Google just achieved.
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