Elon Musk, Sundar Pichai exchange over Google's Willow sparks bold vision of solar power future

A brief but thought-provoking exchange on X between tech leaders Sundar Pichai and Elon Musk has put a spotlight on cutting-edge quantum computing and the future of solar power. The conversation centred around Google’s newly unveiled quantum computing chip, Willow, and segued into ambitious visions of space-based quantum clusters and global energy scaling.

On Monday, Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet, introduced Willow on X, touting its groundbreaking capabilities.

He highlighted the chip’s record-setting performance in benchmark tests, where it solved a computation in under five minutes that would take a supercomputer over 10^25 years — a number exceeding the age of the universe.

Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, responded with a “Wow.”

The exchange quickly turned visionary as Pichai floated the idea of deploying quantum computing clusters in space using SpaceX’s Starship rockets.

Musk replied, “That will probably happen,” before referring to the Kardashev scale, a framework for measuring a civilization’s technological advancement.

“Any self-respecting civilization should at least reach Kardashev Type II. In my opinion, we are currently only at <5% of Type I. To get to ~30%, we would need to place solar panels in all desert or highly arid regions.”

Pichai concurred, emphasising the untapped potential of solar energy.

“Indeed. We should scale solar so much more, amazing that we keep looking at alternatives when the most obvious path is staring at our eyes, literally!”

Google’s announcement of Willow represents a major step forward in the field of quantum computing. The chip achieves a milestone in quantum error correction, a long-standing challenge in the field. Willow reduces errors exponentially as the number of qubits increases, paving the way for scalable quantum systems.

Moreover, Willow’s performance on benchmark tasks, including a computation that would be infeasible for the world’s fastest supercomputers, demonstrates quantum computing’s growing potential to revolutionise fields such as material science, cryptography, and artificial intelligence.