Microsoft’s big Spark deal and its quantum computing breakthrough

With its new Azure data centre region up and running, Microsoft is in deal-making mode, signing a contract with Sprak it claims is New Zealand’s “largest Microsoft public cloud partnership” to date.

It’s also the largest Azure deal in New Zealand to date, according to Microsoft, and one of the largest deployments of Microsoft Copilot, the company’s intelligent chatbot built into the Microsoft productivity suite.

As part of the deal, Spark will move “a proportion of its workloads” to Azure and add Copilot capability for an additional 1,800 Spark employees brining the total to 2,500 seats.

Spark’s Microsoft 365 tenant will have access to “onshore capacity”. 

The value of the deal was not disclosed. It comes as Spark is about to release its first-half 2025 financial results as the company slashes costs, looks to divest non-core assets and tries to address weaknesses in its IT services business.

Spark has significant investments in data centres itself, but works with public cloud operators too. 

“We have a long-term strategic focus on hybrid cloud at Spark,” Spark CEO Jolie Hodson commented today. 

“This partnership enables us to improve our overall cloud economics by modernising our own hybrid cloud environment while continuing to collaborate with Microsoft on the best hybrid cloud solutions for our customers. “

She added that the Copilot extension would allow Spark to focus on embedding AI into our business.

Spark has been offering training to upskill staff in areas like artificial intelligence and data analytics. Microsoft said that the deal will also it collaborate with Spark to extend that internal skilling programme.

When it officially opened its Auckland-based Azure data centre region In December, Microsoft said it was committing to training 100,000 New Zealanders in AI and digital skills over the next two years.

Microsoft’s Majorana 1 quantum chip

Meanwhile, Microsoft revealed a quantum computing breakthrough today that it claims could accelerate the timeframe for reliable quantum computers to become available from decades to a few years.

Outlining its latest research in a paper in the journal Nature, Microsoft described the technology and science underpinning Majorana 1, a quantum chip powered by a “Topological Core Architecture”.

A number of tech companies including Google, IBM, Microsoft and numerous startups, have been in a race to build larger and more stable quantum computers. The machines rely on particle physics and phenomena like superposition and quantum entanglement to process data much more efficiently than classical computers for certain types of uses.

But Microsoft introduced a radical new twist based on an approach that was only floated as a theory less than a decade ago. As Microsoft explains:

“The topoconductor, or topological superconductor, is a special category of material that can create an entirely new state of matter – not a solid, liquid or gas but a topological state. This is harnessed to produce a more stable qubit that is fast, small and can be digitally controlled, without the tradeoffs required by current alternatives,” Microsoft explained.

It suggested it has found a more effective way to deal with error correction using hardware. Error correction has been a major challenge to all quantum computer developers as they have added more “qubits” to scale up the power of the computers.

“An inherent challenge is developing a qubit that can be measured and controlled, while offering protection from environmental noise that corrupts them,” Microsoft noted.

It set out with its quantum computing research programme 20 years ago to develop topological qubits, which it believed would offer “more stable qubits requiring less error correction, thereby unlocking speed, size and controllability advantages”. 

It took a long time to develop because Microsoft had to observe and harness the particles, which are called Majoranas, which had never been seen or created before. Sophisticated magnets and superconductors are required to produce Majoranas.

Microsoft today showed off a quantum computing chip, Majorana 1, which it will now attempt to scale up to one million qubits. The breakthrough explained in Nature has impressed industry observers.

“This is truly an advance for the industry: building a custom chip that uses topological qubits which many consider extremely useful for scaling to powerful quantum computers,” said Markus Pflitsch,  CEO and founder of Terra Quantum, a leading quantum tech company specializing in algorithms, hybrid hardware, and secure quantum communications.   

“The announcement reinforces our assessment that fault-tolerant quantum hardware is closer than many business leaders think.”