It seems to me that he's saying in order to move data at volume, you have to compute on it.

Computation is tricky. Per-bit, if you can handle the network input, you're probably able to fire packets up to the OS layer.

But when you need to run stats on the incoming data, e.g. an ML classifier of "bad/not bad" or "stop/passthrough", you might be O(n^2) or worse. Moore's can't hang.