TOKYO - NTT plans to establish a new investment vehicle, the IOWN AI Fund, to accelerate the global expansion of its next-generation communications infrastructure known as IOWN.
The fund will be backed by 22 companies, including NTT, Sony Group, South Korea's SK Group, and U.S. semiconductor giant Broadcom. The fund is expected to raise approximately $500 million, or around 80 billion yen.
NTT and its partners intend to establish multiple bases, including in Silicon Valley, to invest in AI-related startups and other emerging technology companies. The goal is to promote collaboration with IOWN, a communications platform designed to dramatically reduce power consumption, while accelerating its adoption worldwide.
By supporting startups developing AI technologies and related services, the fund aims to build a broader ecosystem around IOWN and strengthen its position as a key infrastructure platform for the next generation of digital communications.
IOWN (Innovative Optical and Wireless Network) is a next-generation communications and computing infrastructure initiative launched by NTT in 2019 with the goal of dramatically increasing network capacity while reducing power consumption. The project was conceived as a response to the expected surge in data traffic driven by AI, cloud computing, autonomous vehicles, digital twins, and other data-intensive technologies.
NTT unveiled the IOWN concept in May 2019, envisioning a future network architecture that would replace many electronic processing functions with optical technologies. The company argued that conventional semiconductor-based systems would eventually face limits in performance and energy efficiency.
A key milestone came in 2020 with the establishment of the IOWN Global Forum, created by NTT together with Intel and Sony Group. The forum was formed to develop technical standards and encourage global adoption of IOWN technologies. Membership later expanded to include hundreds of companies, universities, and research institutions worldwide.
The core of IOWN consists of three major components:
The All-Photonics Network (APN), which uses optical technology throughout the network to reduce latency and power consumption.
Digital Twin Computing (DTC), which aims to create highly accurate virtual representations of people, objects, and environments.
Cognitive Foundation (CF), a management platform designed to coordinate and optimize computing, storage, and network resources across diverse systems.
NTT has claimed that IOWN technologies could eventually reduce power consumption by up to 100 times, increase transmission capacity by 125 times, and reduce end-to-end latency to one two-hundredth of current levels, although these represent long-term targets rather than currently achieved performance.
Since 2023, NTT has begun commercial deployment of early IOWN services, including optical transport technologies connecting data centers. The company views AI as one of the most important applications for IOWN because the rapid growth of AI computing is causing a sharp increase in electricity demand from data centers.
The newly announced IOWN AI Fund represents the latest stage in the project's development. By partnering with companies such as Sony Group, SK Group, and Broadcom, NTT hopes to encourage AI startups to build technologies compatible with IOWN and accelerate the platform's global adoption.
For NTT, IOWN is considered the successor to the internet infrastructure era that the company helped build through fiber-optic communications. The company has repeatedly described it as a long-term project extending through the 2030s and beyond, with the ambition of becoming a foundational technology for future AI-driven societies.
Source: テレ東BIZ
