A significantly improved recovery time of 130 ps has been achieved in an all‐optical zero‐gap directional coupler containing multiple quantum wells. The mechanism for the all‐optical switching is due to free‐carrier induced refractive nonlinearities at near‐band‐gap resonant frequencies. The large reduction in the switch recovery time was obtained by the application of an external dc bias which sweeps out the carriers from the quantum wells. From our experimental results on the laser pulse width limited switch‐up time of 2 ps, we <m1;&37>deduce that the contribution of self‐electro‐optic effect nonlinearity is negligible in this case.