Microsoft used its Build 2026 developer conference to unveil Majorana 2, a successor to last year’s Majorana 1, alongside a wide slate of agentic AI platform updates designed to give developers an end‑to‑end toolchain for building, tuning and running agentic systems. These releases span quantum hardware, platform services, runtimes, developer tooling and both cloud and local compute options, signaling a push to reduce friction for teams adopting agentic architectures.
On the hardware front Microsoft’s quantum team said Majorana 2’s topological qubits are roughly 1,000× more reliable than the previous generation, with a mean qubit lifetime of around 20 seconds and some instances lasting up to one minute. The company reported that agentic AI techniques helped accelerate these improvements, and reiterated a long‑term target of producing a million‑qubit chip small enough to fit in the palm of a hand, aiming for commercially relevant scalability by 2029.
Several product and research releases target agentic workflows. Microsoft Discovery moved to general availability with a Discovery Engine that uses specialized agents to mimic the scientific method across large knowledge sets. Frontier Tuning was announced to enable domain‑specific, high‑efficiency model refinement. Microsoft Scout was introduced as an always‑on personal work agent built on OpenClaw, and OpenClaw itself is available on Windows in preview. Microsoft also refreshed Copilot’s user interface and released a GitHub Copilot app focused on agentic development.
Infrastructure and interoperability updates are intended to speed development and deployment. Microsoft announced Project Solara as a new platform for agents and Azure HorizonDB to bring PostgreSQL into agentic applications. The company also detailed new GPU‑accelerated analytics for developers and a collaboration with NVIDIA on a unified stack. Windows‑side tooling includes developer‑optimized Windows 11 improvements, updates to the Windows AI API, Windows 365 for Agents to run Cloud PCs for agent workloads, and the Surface RTX Spark Dev Box for local AI compute.
Announcements emphasized production readiness and developer workflows. Microsoft Foundry updates concentrate on deploying, improving and trusting agents in production; Rayfin was presented as an enterprise‑grade application backend; and Web IQ and Microsoft IQ were introduced to support AI grounding and collective intelligence. The GitHub Copilot CLI and app were highlighted as integration points for bringing agentic development into existing pipelines.
Rollout details were explicit for several items: Microsoft Discovery is generally available, OpenClaw on Windows is in preview, and Windows 365 extensions and Windows AI API updates are rolling out to developer audiences. Majorana 2’s performance milestones were framed as steps toward the 2029 scalability goal. Developers seeking deeper technical material, session recordings and hands‑on demos are directed to the Build 2026 homepage, the Official Microsoft Blog and the GitHub Copilot CLI.
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