September 25th, 2026
5 min read
Quantum computing can help to address some of humanity’s biggest and most complex problems. For businesses, quantum computing can amplify optimization and simulation tools, improve planning, decision-making, operational resilience and sustainability, and support growth.
However, it requires one million qubits to operate at that level and the technology is still in development.
Researchers are working on a variety of approaches to quantum computing. One approach that is on track to reach a fault-tolerant, million-qubit-class machine by 2030 is optical quantum computing.
Optical quantum computing offers more scalability and energy efficiency than cryogenic platforms, and it runs at room temperature and atmospheric pressure. With expertise in scaling large optical communications systems, as well as decades of quantum research, NTT is moving into practical development of optical quantum computing.
Optical Technology Can Help Solve the World’s Biggest Challenges
With the rapid advancement of Generative AI, computational demand and energy consumption at data centers is increasing sharply. Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) will place significantly more pressure on global infrastructure, far exceeding what today’s systems can handle. Quantum computing offers a solution, and this is one key reason why expectations have risen so fast.
In the not-too-distant future, quantum computers will be able to tackle complex problems that lie beyond the reach of today’s supercomputers. In addition to supporting the development of AGI, quantum computing can help with formidable tasks such as predicting and addressing climate emergencies, discovery of new medicines, and stabilization of the world’s food supply. For businesses, quantum computing can amplify optimization and simulation tools, allowing for rapid data analysis and vastly improving planning and decision-making. Quantum computing’s ability to solve complex problems can also enhance operational resilience and sustainability, and support business growth.
But quantum computers haven’t yet reached the scale needed to achieve these real-world results. It will take something on the order of a million physical quantum bits (qubits), the basic building blocks of information in a quantum computer.
The timeline is moving fast. Quantum was once projected for the 2040s but global investment and competition have pulled that forward. NTT is now targeting a practical 10,000-qubit-class machine in 2027, verification on real hardware and proof-of-concept work with users in 2028, and a fault-tolerant, million-qubit-class system by 2030. Optical technology can help to get there. By design, it scales more readily than today’s cryogenic platforms, and it consumes far less power.
NTT’s expertise in optical technology extends to deep experience scaling large optical communications systems. By applying that knowledge to scaling optical quantum computing, coupled with NTT Laboratories’ decades of quantum research, NTT has now moved into practical development of optical quantum computing.
Overcoming Quantum Computing Challenges with Optical Technologies
Imagine a world in which climate experts could predict weather-related disasters and evacuate or prepare communities in time to save lives and property. Or where drug discovery and personalized medicine were expedited, reducing inequities in healthcare and ensuring systems are prepared for pandemics. Or where global financial markets were stable due to real-time large-scale risk analysis and investment strategies.
Businesses could rapidly re-route inventory distribution and supply chains to adapt to extreme weather events. Financial institutions and other organizations could run real-time stress tests to adapt portfolios and strategies, avoiding crises. Operations could run more efficiently, and new markets could open up for global businesses.
Researchers around the world are hard at work developing a variety of quantum computing approaches to deliver these kinds of transformations. However, many of these quantum computing approaches face technical challenges when it comes to practical use, primarily around scale and accuracy.
For most approaches, as the number of qubits grows, the size of a quantum computer also grows. Cryogenic platforms such as superconducting qubits must be held close to absolute zero, because thermal energy at ordinary temperatures destroys the fragile quantum states the circuits depend on. Every extra qubit also brings more control wiring into the refrigerator, and the cooling consumes significant amounts of energy. It also caps how hard the system can be driven, since running faster puts more heat where there is least room for it.
Photons carry no such penalty. Light can be modulated and measured at gigahertz rates without a thermal price to pay, so the clock is set by the bandwidth of the optics rather than by a cooling budget, and the system as a whole runs at room temperature and atmospheric pressure. That makes scaling up, and speeding up, a very different proposition.
Accuracy is the other half of the problem. As computations become more complex, “quantum noise” accumulates, whether from electromagnetic radiation, temperature fluctuations, or imperfect control signals, and every approach has to answer for it, optical included. In optical systems, precision is governed above all by the squeezing level of the light source and by loss along the optical path, and quantum error correction on top of that remains work in progress rather than a solved problem.
It is a challenge NTT is well placed to take on, bringing the high-speed error-correction know-how built up over decades in optical communications, together with a waveguide-based squeezed light source of world-leading quality. Multiplexing plays a different role again: by packing many qubits into a single fibre-optic path in time and in wavelength, it is what lets the qubit count grow without the hardware growing with it.
Optics does bring one demanding requirement. In electronics, as soon as wires are connected, electrons flow. With light, the optical paths must be precisely aligned and held stable. NTT has been solving exactly that problem in telecommunications for decades.
Optical Quantum Computing in Practice
This isn’t theoretical. NTT has already applied photonics technologies to optical quantum computers. For example, working with the University of Tokyo and RIKEN, NTT demonstrated the generation of quantum entanglement at 60GHz, a rate over 1,000 times faster than existing methods by using optical amplification. Quantum entanglement is a connection between two particles where their quantum states are linked. Producing these entangled particles quickly is important because it allows a quantum computer to perform certain calculations using relationships between many qubits simultaneously, rather than treating each qubit as completely independent.
Now NTT is collaborating with OptQC to develop scalable and highly reliable optical quantum computers. OptQC is a startup founded on 25 years of optical quantum computing research at the University of Tokyo. Its core members have pioneered key technologies for optical quantum computers, including the world’s first system operating at room temperature and atmospheric pressure, ultra-broadband quantum measurements using optical amplifiers, and the generation of qubits for quantum error correction. Its first machine, MoQuren, is already up and running at AIST’s Global Research and Development Center for Business by Quantum-AI Technology (G-QuAT).
In August 2026, NTT and OptQC signed a capital and business alliance together with a joint research agreement, bringing NTT’s advanced optical communication technologies and OptQC’s expertise in optical quantum computing to accelerate practical implementation. Starting with technical investigations, wavelength multiplexing among the first themes, then development and use case verification, NTT and OptQC are moving toward practical systems.
Roadmap to the Future With Optical Quantum Computing
Organizations are increasingly adopting advanced AI systems, and this is vastly increasing computational demand. Conventional computing cannot keep up. Optical quantum computing provides a solution. What’s more, it can help to solve some of humanity’s greatest and most complex problems.
This approach is highly scalable and more energy efficient than today’s cryogenic platforms, and it builds directly on the optical communications technology the world already runs on.
That value arrives in stages rather than all at once. From around 2028, at roughly 10,000 qubits, the first proof-of-concept trials with users are expected in optimization for telecom, logistics, traffic and energy. In those sectors, computing costs are currently a bottleneck, so even modest gains in speed or efficiency are worth putting to the test. The finance industry follows, with opportunities for portfolio optimization and risk analysis. Then, when fault tolerance becomes visible around 2030, optical quantum computing can start tackling bigger challenges for society, such as new materials and chemistry.
Quantum will not replace conventional high-performance computing, which remains essential for large-scale data processing and simulation. Optical quantum computers will work as accelerators alongside classical systems, connected through IOWN.
With its potential to address climate emergencies, healthcare, financial, and food security challenges, in addition to transforming business though product design, supply chain management and more, optical quantum computing is being built as a sustainable computing platform: one that answers rising demand with lower power consumption.
