MLOps & Infrastructure · beginner · concept 195 of 311 · Updated Nov 4, 2026
The AI Stack
How the pieces fit: silicon and clouds at the bottom, then data infrastructure, then foundation models, then orchestration and tooling, then the applications people actually touch. Knowing the layers turns a soup of company names into a map, and explains who depends on whom when one layer wobbles.
L2 · Confident professionalDevelopersTech leadersLeadershipProduct leadersQA and testingSEO and content
Top AI contributors on this
- Jensen HuangNvidia
- Jeff DeanDiscovery Loop
- Clément DelangueHugging Face
- Satya NadellaMicrosoft
- Sundar PichaiAlphabet / Google
- Alexandr WangMeta
Key terms
Infrastructure layerModel layerOrchestrationApplication layerValue chain
Where you meet it in the real world
Vendor decisions, reading AI news critically, spotting chokepoints and single points of failure
Videos
▶ What Is an AI Stack? LLMs, RAG, & AI Hardware ↗
IBM Technology · YouTube
▶ Open Source vs Closed AI: LLMs, Agents & the AI Stack Explained ↗
IBM Technology · YouTube
Guides and articles
Courses, papers, and more
This unlocks