Called Willow, the American tech titan claims it can take five minutes to solve an issue - which would take the world's fastest supercomputer ten septillion years to figure out.

It added it "demonstrates error correction and performance that paves the way to a useful, large-scale quantum computer".

The firm is "optimistic" that Willow chips can help it demonstrate a "first useful, beyond-classical computation on today's quantum chips that is relevant to a real-world application".

Hartmut Neven, founder and lead of Google Quantum AI, wrote in a blog post: "The Willow chip is a major step on a journey that began over 10 years ago.

"When I founded Google Quantum AI in 2012, the vision was to build a useful, large-scale quantum computer that could harness quantum mechanics — the 'operating system' of nature to the extent we know it today — to benefit society by advancing scientific discovery, developing helpful applications, and tackling some of society's greatest challenges.

"As part of Google Research, our team has charted a long-term roadmap, and Willow moves us significantly along that path towards commercially relevant applications."