A closer look
Copper wires are the technological equivalent of a horse-drawn carriage. They generate heat, consume immense power, and face hard physical speed limits. To fix this, engineers decided to stop fighting electrical resistance and start harnessing the speed of light directly on the motherboard. By laser-welding indium phosphide components onto silicon wafers, they created hybrid chips that blast data through microscopic fiber-optic channels using photons instead of electrons. It essentially shrinks a massive telecommunications network down to the size of a postage stamp, enabling server racks to exchange entire databases in a fraction of a second. The days of melting copper pathways are officially numbered.
