Tracking the evolution and developments coming out of NTT, Inc. (NTT) through its last half-decade or so of platform development is no casual affair. This is not even a question of keyboards and mice. This is not even a question of complex containerisation orchestration techniques driving multi-cloud servers powering parallelised concurrency threads into some form of esoteric abstracted computing layer. So then, just how deep is the technology innovation going on here?
In fact, this is light-based photonics now evolving to create optical quantum computers and the next era of NTT’s own development that it channels to its Innovative Optical and Wireless Network (IOWN) Initiative, including its application to optical quantum computing.
NTT R&D Forum 2025
Entering the lab facilities, working demo areas and press conference halls of NTT R&D Forum 2025 in the Tokyo district of Musashino now feels familiar in some ways, yet this year there are quantum-level developments afoot (both figuratively, literally and technically) because the company has themed this year’s event IOWN: Quantum Leap following the United Nations’ designation of 2025 as the “International Year of Quantum Science and Technology”.
The Japanese government has also designated 2025 as the first year of quantum industrialisation. It is perhaps no surprise that NTT invests over $3 billion annually in its global R&D initiatives, which equates to about thirty percent of its total profit. NTT used this year’s R&D Forum event to once again showcase its recent breakthroughs in its IOWN Initiative, which aims to build an advanced communications infrastructure with optical photonics technologies, achieving ultra-high capacity, ultra-low latency and ultra-low power consumption.
Perhaps the most significant announcement of the exhibition itself, NTT and OptQC have signed an agreement to collaborate on the “realisation of scalable and reliable optical quantum computers” today. OptQC develops optical photonic technologies that go towards building a photonic quantum computer that employs light (using photons) as the carrier for quantum information.
The agreement will apply optical communications technologies developed by NTT under the IOWN Initiative with OptQC’s world-first optical quantum computer that operates at room temperature and pressure.
The companies aim to create a 1-million-qubit optical quantum computer by 2030.
Smart factories, greasing the cogs
With so much of Japan’s infrastructure running on the conglomerate forces that go to make up the total NTT Group proposition, we can report that IOWN is being deeply applied inside smart factory environments. NTT and Toshiba Corporation have demonstrated the successful “remote control of manufacturing equipment” using the IOWN All-Photonics Network.
The company’s controlled production equipment in a 20 millisecond ms control cycle from approximately 300 km away while also performing an AI visual inspection at 4 frames per second (fps) per equipment.
Tsuzumi 2, bang the drum
Named after a traditional Japanese drum, NTT says its own large language model “tsuzumi 2″ is now available. Pronounced “tzuh-zoo-me” and part of the over NTT R&D effort, this is a “proprietary built-from-scratch” that is built as a lightweight model. Why does a lightweight LLM model make sense? Because (in theory, if not in practice) it can help overcome electricity consumption costs and security risks.
According to NTT, “[While] RAG and fine tuning have improved the efficiency of developing domain-specific models for companies and industries; tsuzumi 2 has reinforced knowledge in the financial, medical and public sectors – areas where customer demand was high. As a result, it delivers top-tier performance in those domains and excels in accuracy gains achieved through specialised fine-tuning. In addition, its generic task-specific fine-tuning capability enables versatile use across a wide range of business functions.”
Imagine, mind captioning technology
Proving what appears to be diversity and breadth beyond many technology vendors’ normal realm of operation, NTT has also been working on so-called “mind captioning technology” that generates text descriptions of what a human is seeing visually by analysing the human’s brain activity. The approach decodes brain information through the deployment of a linguistic AI model, essentially verbalising non-verbal information in the brain with what is said to be high accuracy.
As reported on CNN, computational neuroscientist researcher at NTT Tomoyasu Horikawa and his team coined the term mind-captioning after conducting a study using AI to generate descriptive text that mirrors information in the brain about visual details such as objects, places, actions and events, as well as the relationships between them.
Horikawa’s method first used a deep-language AI model to analyse the text captions of more than 2,000 videos, turning each one into a unique numerical ‘meaning signature’. A separate AI tool was then trained on six participants’ brain scans and learnt to find the brain-activity patterns that matched each meaning signature while the participants watched the videos,” noted Max Kozlov, writing on Nature this November 2025.
In wider work, NTT in collaboration with U.S. satellite service provider Loft Orbital, demonstrated the AI analysis of hyperspectral images using a satellite, aiming to advance real-time monitoring of natural disasters, environmental changes and agricultural conditions (such as the early-stage detection of disease or poor crop growth). Well, who doesn’t love hyperspectral satellite images, right?
What is a Large Action Model?
We know by now what a small or large language model is… and we understand retrieval augmented generation techniques designed to align LLMs towards more narrow SLM-level domain-specific knowledge, but what is a large action model, or LAM?
NTT and NTT DOCOMO have developed a new AI technology called the Large Action Model (LAM) to enable highly personalised, one-to-one marketing strategies. The LAM develops custom marketing tailored to the individual by pre-learning patterns in behavioural sequences from customer time-series data to predict customers’ intent and then further learning the content, method, timing and effectiveness of promotional measures to personalise them.
“Concurrent to its development of advanced computation capabilities, NTT researchers are developing and deploying leading-edge cybersecurity systems to contend with the growing threat of quantum and AI-based cyberattacks,” stated the company in an event press release. “NTT Research, the Silicon Valley-based fundamental research arm of NTT, has announced a new set of cybersecurity solutions powered by attribute-based encryption (ABE) to combat the rising threat of quantum computing and AI.”
Fuzzy Identity-based Encryption
NOTE: ABE, which enables fine-grain access control and enforcement policies, was first proposed by NTT Research Cryptography & Information Security Lab director Dr. Brent Waters and his co-author, Dr. Amit Sahai, in a 2005 paper, “Fuzzy Identity-based Encryption.”
The company has also launched a new organisation, which it hopes will transform the future of autonomous driving while continuing to evolve the capabilities of infrastructure monitoring digital transformation. NTT Mobility is a new venture based on the company’s networking expertise to drive “level 4 autonomous vehicle adoption” in the immediate future.
What is a level 4 autonomous vehicle?
It is a highly automated car (although it could be some other form of transport) that can perform all driving tasks asked of it under specific, but limited conditions (defined within the realm of what is known as operational design domain… also known as ODD) without any human intervention. If the software system driving the vehicle fails or exits the ODD, the vehicle is capable of handling the situation safely, typically by bringing the vehicle to a minimal risk condition (MRCD) state, which is a fancy way of saying its stops.
NTT R&D Forum 2026, key takeaways
Spending a couple of days with a vendor is a surefire way to absorb some of the underlying personality and psyche of a company. That insight is achievable with NTT, but in a slightly unusual way.
CEO of NTT Akira Shimada is not a man who likes to smile, especially in his keynotes. He prefers to deliver them in the style of what feels like a comparatively stern address, almost berating the audience for failing to have understood quantum photonics appropriately. His dark-suited C-suite style is just his way; local NTT technies from Japan itself are always smiling, impossibly polite and super-charged with enthusiasm by virtue of their encyclopedic knowledge of their respective domains.
As digital as NTT is (by which we mean post-digital the quantum photonics sense of the word), the bottom line with the company is one that champions sustainable, secure technology for good. The IOWN initiative itself is designed to overcome the limitations of existing infrastructure with technologies, optimise every individual’s existence on the planet and create a rich society that is tolerant of diversity.
In NTT’s case, that may be why it’s Big In Japan.