That's true when you compare electrical vs optical links for NICs in datacenters. But this is about Silcon Photonics, which changes the equation significantly. e.g. it can be used for on-chip optical interconnects.

The silicon real estate being used for interconnect fabric PHIs is becoming significant and, unlike compute, do not scale well with node shrinks. On-die photonics means you can cut out a big chunk of your PHIs and avoid the the latency of going to NICs. The PIUMA architecture even used on-die switches to avoid having to use external switches.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-demoes-8-core-528-th...