Japan has just pulled off the extraordinary, recording the world’s fastest internet speed at 1.02 petabits per second, which researchers in the country have reached.
In layman’s terms, that is internet fast enough to make you download all Netflix movies at once in seconds and stream millions of 8K videos at once. Surprisingly, the breakthrough was registered thanks to fiber optic technology, that is used regularly around the world. The achievement has been praised by many as a potential move to the next level of data sharing around the world.
Researchers at Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology quietly demonstrated this feat by sending data at 1.02 petabits per second in June 2025.
The team used a special 19-core fiber optic cable instead of one, allowing them to transmit data in multiple parallel streams across 1,800 kilometres. For context, that’s the distance from Nairobi to Kongolo, DRC.
According to reports, this speed has now surpassed the previous one that was achieved in the same institution at 402 terabits per second back in 2024.
Unfortunately, it will probably take years before we ever see such internet speeds available to the public and even then, it will super expensive for most people or even companies.
Either way, this is a huge milestone that could see the world break the limits of today’s networks when it comes to cloud computing, AI and content consumption across the world.
This type of internet speed could enable instantaneous global AI processing, connecting data centres across continents as if they were on the same local network, given the demands of cloud computing, generative AI, autonomous vehicles, and real-time translation tools, which all require massive data throughput.
