Japanese telecom giant NTT is deepening its ties with quantum startup OptQC, and the two now share an unusually specific goal: a fault-tolerant quantum computer with one million qubits.
According to SDxCentral, NTT has invested in OptQC in a move that pushes the relationship past joint research and toward commercialization. SDxCentral reports the partners are targeting a fault-tolerant one-million-qubit system by fiscal 2030. The collaboration was also covered by Mobile World Live, which framed it as NTT advancing its existing work with OptQC, and by International Business Times, which highlighted the million-qubit photonic target.
The key word is photonic. Most of the quantum computers you've read about — from IBM, Google and others — encode information in superconducting circuits chilled to near absolute zero. OptQC's approach uses light instead. Optical systems are attractive because photons are naturally resistant to some of the interference that plagues other designs, and because they can potentially run without the enormous refrigeration overhead.
The other key word is fault-tolerant. Today's quantum machines make errors constantly, and correcting those errors consumes huge numbers of physical qubits. That's a large part of why a million-qubit figure appears at all: scale is the price of reliability, not just raw speed.
A caveat worth stating plainly: the reporting here describes a target and an investment, not a working machine. Fiscal 2030 is years out, and the sources describe intent rather than demonstrated hardware.
It matters because a telecom operator putting money behind optical quantum computing signals that the technology's most credible path to real-world scale may run through the same photonics and fiber expertise that already moves the world's internet traffic.