What is this Google quantum chip called?

Google's quantum chip is called Willow, and it demonstrated 'below threshold' quantum error correction in a paper published in December 2024, meaning errors actually shrank exponentially as more physical qubits were added to encode a single logical qubit, a milestone researchers had been chasing for roughly 30 years.

Sycamore was an earlier Google quantum chip, known mainly for a 2019 demonstration of speed advantages over classical computers, not for this error-reduction milestone. Condor refers to a different company's superconducting quantum chip project, so neither one is the chip behind this particular December 2024 announcement.

This kind of error correction matters because quantum bits are notoriously fragile and error-prone, so showing that adding more qubits can make a system more reliable rather than less is considered a necessary building block toward a future large-scale, practical quantum computer.