NTT Data, Future Proofs at Expo Osaka

OSAKA – A ring that encloses the world within it . It seems like a flat-earther’s dream, but it’s actually the Osaka Expo. The “ ring ” stands on an artificial island in the bay. It is, in fact, a ring made entirely of wood , with an external diameter of 700 metres and a circumference of 2.2 km, about twenty metres high and planted, on which you can walk, weather permitting, and have a bird’s eye view of all the national pavilions contained within it and of the endless and extremely orderly – after all, we are in Japan – queues to visit them. And if the length of the lines is an indicator of appreciation, the average 5-hour wait to visit the Italian one (which brought to Osaka works by Caravaggio, Michelangelo, Boccioni, two sheets of Leonardo da Vinci's Atlantic Coast... very much from the past, a little less from the future, Strait Bridge aside) is certainly on the podium of the most appreciated, also thanks to the intelligent choice of dedicating a week to each region, which thus presents potential partners and investors with its specificities in every field, from tourism to industry, from craftsmanship to gastronomy.

Outside the ring only the very elegant Japanese pavilion and those of the companies. Among these NTT , of which NTT Data is the technological and strategic consulting arm .

Ludovico Diaz, CEO of NTT DATA Italia , guided us to the NTT pavilion, the largest of a private company at Expo.

A floating structure made of carbon threads, which reacts to the emotions experienced by visitors inside: cameras capture their expressions and transmit them in real time to the external structure: the carbon threads vibrate and the curtains sway and fluctuate, creating shadows (the shadow, the most requested asset of Expo 2025) in response to the involvement of visitors.

The route designed by NTT, divided into three rooms, it offers a sort of interactive show that relies on IOWN technology , an acronym for Innovative Optical and Wireless Network. It is a consortium born a few years ago on the initiative of NTT, Intel and Sony, today all the big names are there, from hyperscalers to hardware manufacturers.

The goal is to create a new communications infrastructure that, in simple terms, aims to create a new internet, which will replace electronics with photonics for data transmission , using optical and wireless technology to improve communications and information processing. This approach will be able, according to the company's calculations, to transmit data and information 125 times faster , to decrease latency up to 200 times and to reduce energy consumption up to 100 times .

“Today, optical fiber carries data but the devices at both ends of the network (routers, firewalls, storage, processors) are electronic with all that this entails in terms of consumption, heating, etc. – explains Diaz –. The goal is to have circuits and motherboards where photons run instead of electrons with much lower power, consumption, and latency, in the order of orders of magnitude. It is a medium-long term project, today we are in phase 1, the time horizon is 2030 , but when it arrives it will revolutionize the IT infrastructure”.

Applications? Many. “For example, one of the great works that NTT is doing at the R&D level is the Theme data centers in space , they will be a revolution for sustainability, powered by solar panels. But to enable all this, new technologies are needed such as 6G which enables communication towards space with much lower latencies” explains Roberto Roggero, Head of Tangity (we will talk about it shortly).

“At the consumer level, it will be possible to transmit the 5 senses, starting from smell and touch, which require, in addition to ad hoc devices, above all the ability to transmit enormous quantities of data – continues Diaz -. On the business side, it will be possible to replicate a data center by simultaneously transferring data thousands of km away, and also distribute the workload, decoupling GPU and data for AI, which is not the case now”.

And then the direction of events remotely, without having to move machines and people like today due to latency problems and with a significant reduction in costs, performing surgical operations remotely, with the control center that can move a thousand km away, while today you cannot exceed up to 100 km. In this case the problem is not the hardware, robotic hands exist and are already used, but the network power for latency.

Let's go back to the NTT pavilion in Osaka . The possible benefits of IOWN are visible above all in the second room, which shows an immersive performance recorded in April 2025 with the Japanese musical group Perfume . The show, visible with 3D glasses, connects the Expo site, the Expo'70 commemorative park in Suita City and a virtual version of the 1970 Osaka Expo . The sensation is that of a live show , thanks to a floor that vibrates in synchronization with the performance on the screen, the lights and above all through the 3D spatial transmission in real time. The technological key is the absence of latency, allowed precisely by the IOWN technology which allows the perfect fusion of sounds and images even from different locations and far from each other and from the visitors.

The third area is called “Another Me”: upon entering the pavilion, each person’s own avatar is generated through a scanning process. At this point, the “other me” comes to life, starting to move autonomously on a giant screen, transforming in appearance and interacting with other avatars.

Next up is the exhibition space featuring NTT's various technologies, especially the star of the NTT show, IOWN. And then Feel Tech, developed by NTT DOCOMO. It uses piezoelectric sensors to detect the vibrations of human touch and transfers them via a transducer. The potential applications of Feel Tech, which is still in its infancy, include the medical field, art, e-commerce, and crafts. For example, in e-commerce it could allow customers to feel the fabric of clothes or the texture of a material before purchasing.

After sight, hearing and touch, it is the turn of smell: NTT has in fact presented a system capable of reproducing about thirty different scents, starting from three fundamental odors. Here too, we are still far from reproducing a real experience, but the first steps have been taken and with the speed with which technology advances, and with the new prospects of transmitting ever greater quantities of data opened up by quantum computing and photonics, it is not certain that we will have to wait too long.

A few numbers

NTT has a range of services that spans from consulting to infrastructure and data center, “We are unique from this point of view – comments Diaz. We are a B2B company, our target market are large organizations for which we try to develop solutions that improve the lives of citizens”.

NTT Data is part of the NTT Group, Nippon Telegraph & Telecom, which laid the first telegraph line between Tokyo and Yokohama in 1870; born as a public company, it was privatized in 1985. Total revenue in 2024 was 97 billion dollars 2024, “which places us as the fourth largest telecommunications company in the world after China Mobile, Verizon and AT&T” explains Diaz.

NTT Data is the third largest data center provider in the world: “a third of those of Amazon, Google, Microsoft were designed and built and managed by NTT Data, even at the physical infrastructure level. Our peculiarity is that we are one of the very few cases of telecommunications companies that have managed to create an IT services company with a significant critical mass, precisely NTT Data has been a private company since 1988, before it was a business unit. Now it is worth over 30 billion dollars, a third of the group's turnover, 18 of which come from services outside Japan, with Italy, Germany, Spain, Great Britain and India as the main markets.

We have been present in Italy since 2010, and today we employ 6,000 people."

South-shoring

Italy is one of the reference countries, with 650 million euros in revenues in 2024. In the peninsula, NTT Data is present in 12 cities, with many offices and locations in the South. “Initially this happened due to the difficulty of finding professionals in the main cities – Diaz reasons -: we discovered several excellent universities in cities in the South such as Cosenza, Bari, Salerno, Naples, which pushed us to open offices. This triggered a virtuous mechanism to attract and support talents who would otherwise have to move to the North or even abroad, while in this way they remain at home despite being part of a large multinational group. Our pride is the Innovation Center, in Milan since 2022. It is not a museum, but a real research and development center where you can see real applications of real companies. Today it is one of the 4 most important in the group with Tokyo, Palo Alto, and Bangalore”.

Technologies such as quantum computing, blockchain, digital twin, cybersecurity, robotics, and generative AI have been studied here since 2017. And then there is an R&D center in Cosenza, which deals with the development of quantum computing algorithms that run on traditional systems “both to be ready when the hardware arrives and because the future will be hybrid,” says Diaz.

Tangity, Italian design all over the world

But NTT Data Italia has a big ace to play. Roberto Roggero, Head of Tangity, tells us. “It is a source of pride for the company, which has expanded from Italy to the entire NTT world. Our role is to bring “humanity” to tech. It all started in 2013, we realized that NTT Data did not have an internal design service and we decided to create it from scratch, internally without acquisitions unlike our competitors. We started with 12, over time we were asked to become a global center, and we created all the design centers in the world starting from Tokyo, then London, Shanghai, Mexico City etc. Now more than 1,200 people work at Tangity worldwide, 140 in Italy”. In practice, in addition to providing external consulting services, Tangity is a corporate staff service: “it works with all sectors, from HR to marketing, it enters into all of NTT Data's offers” Diaz concludes.

It is clear that the next hype, after agentic AI, will be physical AI , as demonstrated by Sam Altman's acquisition of Jony Ive's studio, “Steve Jobs' designer” according to Roggero, who helped design the iPhone.

Tangity knows this too: “We started from digital, but in the last 5 years we have also moved to the physical world, acquiring an industrial design and product engineering team. This is because AI will have a very strong impact on physical products too, LLMs will enter hardware" explains Roggero. “Our role is to start from people and not from tech to build the products and services of the future”. And Tangity has already had some successes. For example, after many years in the finals, in 2024 it won the Compasso d'Oro , for the creation of Acea's water management system which has allowed losses to be reduced by 25% thanks to the use of sensors and AI. And Enel's new street boxes are being installed in Italy, which “from being hideous objects and targets of vandalism have become design objects, more beautiful, sustainable, and not vandalizable”.