The Sequence Opinion #921: AI’s Sixth Layer Is Finance
Jensen Huang’s five-layer cake explains how intelligence is manufactured. The missing layer explains how quickly - and by whom - it can scale.

TL;DR
- AI's apparent simplicity hides a complex industrial process involving energy, chips, infrastructure, models, and applications.
- Jensen Huang's five-layer cake model describes the AI manufacturing process from energy to applications.
- Demand for successful AI applications drives activity through all the underlying layers, back to the power plant.
- The described model is incomplete because it does not account for the financial aspect, the balance sheet, which is a crucial sixth layer.