Interview with Matthias Troyer, Vice President & Technical Fellow at Microsoft

In this interview, Global Quantum Intelligence’s George Schwartz and Microsoft’s Matthias Troyer discuss the primary pathways, economic realities, and technical bottlenecks associated with scaling quantum computing to achieve practical utility. They analyze the viability of various qubit architectures—highlighting why Microsoft favors topological and neutral atom technologies over alternatives like transmons—and evaluate target applications, concluding that quantum chemistry offers true commercial value while big data, machine learning, and optimization face significant speed and data I/O limitations. Additionally, Troyer addresses the necessity of accelerating transitions to post-quantum cryptography, details how AI integration can help resolve critical classical embedding problems in molecular simulations, and advocates for evaluating quantum developments using holistic metrics—specifically end-to-end cost in “dollars per solution” and a four-dimensional framework for measuring logical qubit capabilities. George Schwartz:At GQI, we’re tracking the quantum ecosystem, and we’re seeing all these incredible different modalities, projections, a lot of things that happen at this conference of QEC, all these different types of improvements in decoding, for example with Nvidia, what you were showing today in your talk about all the parallels between CPU and a QPU. We want to stay in pace with the industry as possible and really want to get insights and also…