Equinix Japan, NTT East, and cloud firm Sakura Internet are to collaborate on a photonics-based proof of concept (POC) powering data center connectivity.The concept hinges on NTT’s IoT and all-photonic network (APN) technology concept, which will be used to connect Sakura Internet's Ishikari data center with Equinix facilities in Tokyo. The POC sees telecom operator NTT East provide APN-connectivity powered by NTT’s Innovative Optical and Wireless Network (IOWN) service. Sakura Internet meanwhile will provide the service platform and test environment from its Hokkaido-based data center, while Equinix’s Japanese arm provides interconnection infrastructure, ecosystem connectivity, and operational design. A possible configuration may see Equinix’s Fabric platform used for connections to external cloud services and partner ecosystems.Together, the trio will test throughput, latency, and other network performance metrics in a live environment connecting Hokkaido and Tokyo to define the operating conditions necessary for practical deployment. Hokkaido hosts the Ishikari Bay New Port area, a major hub for data centers in Japan that includes facilities owned by Kyocera Communication Systems and an upcoming build from NTT East's engineering and infrastructure subsidiary, NTT-ME.NTT's IOWN APN driveThe POC further validates the NTT parent group’s IOWN-APN push. A weak mobile showing in the Japanese giant’s most recent earnings saw NTT CEO Akira Shimada pivot the company’s focus to IoT and APN efforts.“We will retain our cash generation capabilities by stabilizing profits while renaming it the connectivity area and transitioning it into an IOWN and AI-native infrastructure,” Shimada declared.In an interview with this title, Masahisa Kawashima, NTT’s IOWN technical director and chair of the IOWN Global Forum, argued that as AI drives demand for greater network bandwidth, IOWN-APN enables operators to support any type of data traffic while centralizing packet nodes in the cloud and layering on value-added services such as security.NTT’s photonics lead claimed the approach reduces the need for massive, centralized data centers by allowing workloads to be distributed across smaller facilities powered by locally available renewable energy. According to Kawashima, the architecture also forms the foundation of NTT's AI strategy, with APN's high-speed, low-latency optical connectivity linking distributed AI data centers to better support both model training and inference.The APN drive saw NTT DoCoMo reveal an in-network computing capability within its mainline 5G core this year that connects the mobile network to the all-photonics service to help coordinate AI inference processing in tandem with traffic control. This deployment followed an APN service in Hong Kong from DoCoMo targeting low-latency needs for financial institutions in the region.