Google’s Willow Magic-State Error Is One Million Times Above RSA Benchmark

Google’s Willow processor lowered magic-state errors about 40-fold, but its roughly 10⁻⁴ error rate remains about one million times above a design benchmark associated with factoring RSA-2048. Google Quantum AI announced the result Thursday, Oct. 15. The experiment measured fidelity of 99.99% and retained 8% of attempts after error checks. It prepared quantum states; it did not factor an RSA key. Magic states enable non-Clifford operations used in universal, fault-tolerant quantum computing. Willow has 105 tunable transmon qubits. Researchers transferred a cultivated state from a distance-3 color code to a distance-5 surface code, demonstrating the process across two types of error-correction codes. The million-fold comparison uses a roughly 10⁻¹⁰ magic-state infidelity associated with one RSA-2048 design. That figure is not a universal raw-state cutoff for factoring a key.

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