Anyone remember this chart? Between 2017 and 2022, if you went to any optical comms or networking conference, eight out of ten speakers had this on their intro slide. Cisco VNI. The forecast that global IP traffic would hit 396 exabytes per month by 2022. For people working on EICs and photonic devices, this was basically our Moore's Law slide. "Why does our research matter?" One chart. Done. It's 2026 now and actual traffic is around 600 EB/month. Cisco's 2022 forecast has been exceeded by over 50% in just four years. That's roughly 14 petabytes flowing across the planet every single minute. And yet the growth rate itself has slowed from 26% CAGR down to about 16%. In the age of AI? Why isn't it accelerating? The answer is almost anticlimactic. 80% of global traffic is still video streaming. An LLM text API call is dust compared to a single Netflix 4K stream. For AI to become the real traffic monster, you need real-time video generation at Sora scale, autonomous vision pipelines, data centers screaming at each other nonstop — and that's still early days. So here's the takeaway. When that next jump does come, this graph goes vertical again, and there is no universe where you move 600 EB/month on electrical signals alone. Light is the only answer. Photonics folks, time to update your intro slide. The numbers got scarier.