ELECTRONS JUST LOST THE WAR FOR REALITY November 2025: Three laboratories independently shattered the fundamental ceiling of computation. Nobody noticed. You’re about to. MIT built a processor that thinks in half a nanosecond. 92% neural accuracy. One attojoule per operation. That’s one quintillionth of a joule. Your brain uses 20 watts. This uses less energy than a photon carries. Aalto physicists achieved something physicists said was impossible: mathematics performed by light itself. No electronics. No conversion loss. No heat. Calculation at 300 million meters per second. Instant. China’s quantum photonic chip delivers 1000x speedup on problems that would take conventional systems lifetimes. Commercial prototype. Shipping. Here’s what they’re not telling you: Every AI system today bleeds 30% of its energy converting between light and electricity. Every single one. The quadrillion-dollar AI industry runs on a fundamentally broken architecture. Like powering cities by converting electricity to steam and back. Photons don’t do that. They interfere. Parallel. Linear scaling. Physics-level efficiency that makes electronics look like burning coal. The market knows: Silicon photonics erupts from $278M to $2.7B by 2030. Co-packaged optics: $46M to $8.1B. Growth rates that only appear before monopolies shatter. By 2040, if nonlinear photonic materials scale to one million neurons per chip, photonic systems capture 99% of AI data processing worldwide. Not processors. The pathways. Where 90% of energy dies today. This means carbon-neutral exascale AI. This means intelligence in devices physics said couldn’t hold it. This means the climate math for AI just inverted from catastrophic to negligible. But it also means whoever controls photonic fabrication controls the future of thought itself. Three nations. Maybe two. TSMC already cutting 90% energy in prototypes. The transition from vacuum tubes to transistors took 20 years and created the modern world. ...