INTERVIEW: NTT Eyes Business Partnership with Rapidus

Tokyo, April 21 (Jiji Press)–NTT Inc. President and CEO Akira Shimada has said that the major telecommunications company hopes to become a business partner of Rapidus Corp., which aims to start mass production of next-generation semiconductors. “Our technology will help develop attractive products with much lower power consumption,” Shimada said in a recent interview. Rapidus, in which NTT has already invested, aims to begin mass production of next-generation chips in fiscal 2027. It plans to conduct both front-end and back-end manufacturing, which involves forming circuits on wafers and assembling final products, respectively. NTT expects its component product using photonics-electronics convergence technology, which transmits and processes data with optical signals, to be incorporated into the back-end process. “Rapidus is also considering that,” Shimada said. He noted that NTT is likely to commercialize the product early next year. “We are also considering selling it to large-scale cloud service providers and have already received positive responses,” he added. Elsewhere in the interview, Shimada said that NTT Docomo Inc., the NTT group’s mobile phone unit “must continue efforts in fiscal 2026” to improve communication quality in response to growing data traffic driven by services such as video streaming. END [Copyright The Jiji Press, Ltd.]