NTT has become the latest firm to join the Ultra Ethernet Consortium (UEC).

The Japanese tech giant joined a group looking to take the longstanding protocol to the next level, ensuring Ethernet can support high-performance workloads.

UEC released its first specification in the summer, which adds a modern remote direct memory access (RDMA) approach to provide low-latency transport for high-throughput environments – while also ensuring interoperability to avoid vendor lock-in.

NTT said its UEC participation will help it add value for its Innovative Optical and Wireless Network (IOWN) photonic networking solutions. Its engineers have been steadily building out its IOWN offerings, with a view to kickstarting commercial deployments by 2030.

The UEC was founded in mid-2023 by the likes of AMD, Arista, Broadcom, Cisco, Eviden, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Intel, Meta, and Microsoft, working together to create an Ethernet-based open, interoperable architecture capable of meeting the ever-growing demands for AI and high-performance computing (HPC).

Its members have started deploying Ultra Ethernet-compliant solutions, such as Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, which has been leveraging AMD’s 400GbE Pensando Pollara NIC.

Nokia completed an end-to-end Ultra Ethernet test back in October alongside Keysight Technologies, before a month later unveiling a new UEC-compliant line of routers, the 7220 IXR H6 series. Meanwhile, Broadcom showcased its UEC-supportive Thor Ultra NIC earlier this year, which it claimed is capable of connecting more than 100,000 XPUs to large-scale AI clusters.

In addition to supporting the UEC’s Ethernet efforts, NTT has been meticulously building out its networking stack, with its 2025 chef-d'œuvre being a prototype chip capable of rewriting itself using light patterns.

Detailed in a paper published back in October with Cornell University and Stanford University, NTT’s programmable nonlinear photonic waveguide aims to break the traditional "one device, one function" paradigm by using structured light patterns to dynamically reconfigure the same chip for different optical tasks.