The infrastructure under the cake
Fable 5 · data curated through July 2026
A companion dimension of the Five Layer AI Cake: 5 categories.
What this dimension is
The five layers describe where value is captured. This dimension describes what the whole stack physically rests on: the buildings, the power, the fibre and the switches. A training cluster is an electrical machine before it is software, and it fails on its slowest link.
Data Center Operators
The concrete boxes everybody else rents. Hyperscalers + colos + neoclouds all depend on landlords like these.
| Company | Layer | Influence | Why it is here |
|---|---|---|---|
| Digital Realty | Cloud & Compute | 6/10 | 300+ data centers globally. The largest AI-era landlord. |
| Equinix | Cloud & Compute | 7/10 | 260+ IBX colos + 2,400+ interconnects. Where clouds peer with each other. |
| Vantage Data Centers | Cloud & Compute | 5/10 | Hyperscale builds. DigitalBridge-backed. 1GW+ campuses. |
| CoreWeave | Cloud & Compute | 7/10 | Neocloud darling. Pivoted from crypto to AI. |
| Oracle Cloud | Cloud & Compute | 5/10 | Stargate partner. Back-door into AI infra. |
Energy & Nuclear
Training clusters are electrical machines before they are software. Nuclear is back because AI's baseload needs won't wait for grid upgrades.
| Company | Layer | Influence | Why it is here |
|---|---|---|---|
| Constellation Energy | Cloud & Compute | 6/10 | Restarting Three Mile Island for Microsoft. America's largest nuclear operator. |
| Kairos Power | Cloud & Compute | 4/10 | Small modular reactors (SMRs). Google signed for 500MW. Deployment 2030. |
| X-energy | Cloud & Compute | 4/10 | High-temp gas-cooled SMRs. Amazon backing + $500M Series C-1 2024. |
Networking Silicon + Optical
Ethernet vs InfiniBand, switches, photonic fabrics. A 100K-GPU cluster fails on its slowest link.
| Company | Layer | Influence | Why it is here |
|---|---|---|---|
| Broadcom | Silicon | 7/10 | Networking silicon for every hyperscaler. Tomahawk switches, custom XPUs. |
| Arista Networks | Silicon | 5/10 | Data-center Ethernet. The anti-InfiniBand bet for AI clusters. |
| Lightmatter | Silicon | 4/10 | Optical interconnect — photonic compute fabrics. Cluster-scale bet. |
| NVIDIA | Silicon | 10/10 | GPU monopoly on AI training. CUDA moat. |
| Corning | Silicon | 4/10 | Fiber optic cable for sea-cable and data-center builds. 170-year-old picks-and-shovels. |
Submarine Cables
Google (Equiano, Curie), Meta+MSFT (Marea), the 2Africa consortium. The AI era literally runs on light pipes under the ocean.
| Company | Layer | Influence | Why it is here |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google Cloud | Cloud & Compute · Silicon · Foundation Models · Applications | 9/10 | TPUs + Gemini + Workspace. Only full-stack vertical. |
| Meta AI | Foundation Models · Tooling & Orchestration | 8/10 | Llama, PyTorch — the open-weight anchor. |
| Microsoft Azure | Cloud & Compute · Foundation Models · Applications | 10/10 | OpenAI infra. Copilot everywhere. |
| AWS | Cloud & Compute | 9/10 | Cloud hyperscaler. Bedrock model gateway, Trainium/Inferentia chips. Anthropic partner. |
| Corning | Silicon | 4/10 | Fiber optic cable for sea-cable and data-center builds. 170-year-old picks-and-shovels. |
Campus Sites · where it gets built
Ashburn VA (the capital), Memphis TN (xAI Colossus), Abilene TX (Stargate), Columbus OH, Dublin, Frankfurt. Land, water, power — in that order.
| Company | Layer | Influence | Why it is here |
|---|---|---|---|
| xAI | Foundation Models · Applications | 6/10 | Grok. Colossus supercluster in Memphis. |
| OpenAI | Foundation Models · Applications · Tooling & Orchestration | 10/10 | ChatGPT, GPT-4, Sora, o-series. Defined the category. |
| Microsoft Azure | Cloud & Compute · Foundation Models · Applications | 10/10 | OpenAI infra. Copilot everywhere. |
| AWS | Cloud & Compute | 9/10 | Cloud hyperscaler. Bedrock model gateway, Trainium/Inferentia chips. Anthropic partner. |
| Google Cloud | Cloud & Compute · Silicon · Foundation Models · Applications | 9/10 | TPUs + Gemini + Workspace. Only full-stack vertical. |
Where this sits
Read the full atlas, the five layers from Silicon upward, or open the interactive view.
The Five Layer AI Cake is published by ConeApex, the trading name of Nirukta Digital XR Technologies Private Limited (CIN U62090TS2025PTC198275), Hyderabad, Telangana, India. The dataset is licensed CC BY 4.0 — cite it freely. See llms.txt for how to attribute it.