SANTA BARBARA, California, Dec 9 (Reuters) - Google

on Monday said that it has overcome a key challenge in

quantum computing with a new generation of chip, solving a

computing problem in five minutes that would take a classical

computer more time than the history of the universe.

Like other tech giants such as Microsoft ( MSFT ) and

International Business Machines ( IBM ), Alphabet's Google is

chasing quantum computing because it promises computing speeds

far faster than today's fastest systems. While the math problem

solved by the company's Santa Barbara, California quantum lab

does not have commercial applications, Google hopes quantum

computers will one day solve problems in medicine, battery

chemistry and artificial intelligence that are out of reach for

today's computers.

The results released Monday came from a new chip called

Willow that has 105 "qubits," which are the building blocks of

quantum computers. Qubits are fast but error-prone, because they

can be jostled by something as small as a subatomic particle

from events in outer space.

As more qubits are packed onto a chip, those errors can add

up to make the chip no better than a conventional computer chip.

So since the 1990s, scientists have been working on quantum

error-correction.

In a paper published in the journal Nature on Monday, Google

said that it has found a way to string together the Willow

chip's qubits so that error rates go down as the number of

qubits goes up. The company also says it can correct errors in

real time, a key step toward making its quantum machines

practical.

"We are past the break even point," Hartmut Neven, who leads

the Google Quantum AI unit, said in an interview.

In 2019, IBM ( IBM ) challenged Google's claim that Google's quantum

chip solved a problem that would take a classical computer

10,000 years, saying the problem could be solved in

two-and-a-half days using different technical assumptions about

a classical system.

In a blog post Monday, Google said it took some of those

concerns into account in its newest estimates. Even under the

most idealistic conditions, Google said a classical computer

would still take a billion years to get the same results as its

newest chip.

Some of Google's rivals are producing chips with a larger

number of qubits than Google, but Google is focused on making

the most reliable qubits it can, Anthony Megrant, chief

architect for Google Quantum AI, said in an interview.

Google fabricated its previous chips in a shared facility at

the University of California, Santa Barbara, but built its own

dedicated fabrication facility to produce its Willow chips.

Megrant said that new facility will speed up how fast Google can

make future chips, which are chilled in huge refrigerators

called cryostats to run experiments.

"If we have a good idea, we want somebody on the team to be

able to ... get that into the clean room and into one of these

cryostats as fast as possible, so we can get lots of cycles of

learning," Megrant said.