The AI industry is structured in layers, starting from hardware to cloud infrastructure, AI models, vertical AI applications, and consumer apps/hardware.
Competitive moats can be built at any layer, either through branding, UX, or architectural/manufacturing advantages.
No single company can dominate the entire AI stack; instead, they focus on specific layers or intersections.
AI Chips: Market leaders include NVIDIA (GPUs), Google (TPUs), AMD (AI accelerators), Intel (Habana Gaudi), and startups like Cerebras, Graphcore, and Hailo.
Memory Systems: Samsung, SK Hynix, Micron dominate high-bandwidth memory (HBM) and AI-optimized storage.
Specialized Processors: Companies like IBM, Tenstorrent, and Mythic AI design AI-specific chips.
Interconnect & Data Fabric: Broadcom, Cisco, and NVIDIA (Mellanox) provide networking solutions for AI workloads.
3. AI Cloud Infrastructure: Powering AI at Scale
Cloud AI Providers: AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, and Oracle Cloud offer AI training, inference, and deployment services.
GPU Cloud Infrastructure: CoreWeave, Lambda Labs, Cerebras Cloud specialize in high-performance AI compute.
AI Storage & Data Management: VAST Data, WekaIO, and Pure Storage optimize data pipelines for AI.
Model Deployment & Orchestration: Databricks, Hugging Face, Run:ai, OctoML enable AI model hosting and scaling.
Networking & Interconnect Solutions: NVIDIA (Mellanox), Broadcom, Arista Networks, Cisco support AI data centers.
4. AI Models: The Intelligence Layer
Foundation Model Developers: OpenAI, DeepMind, Microsoft, Anthropic, Meta AI, Mistral AI, Baidu, Alibaba Cloud.
Model Fine-Tuning & Customization: Hugging Face, Cohere, Databricks, OctoML.
Domain-Specific AI Models: BloombergGPT (finance), IBM Watson (enterprise), Character.AI (chatbots).
Model Deployment & Orchestration: Run:ai, CoreWeave, Lambda Labs.
AI Safety & Alignment: OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind focus on responsible AI.
Open-Source AI: Hugging Face, Mistral AI, Meta AI (Llama), BigScience (BLOOM).
Key Takes
The market is rapidly evolving, with emerging players disrupting established incumbents in hardware, cloud, models, vertical AI, and consumer applications.
The AI industry is highly competitive but offers multiple entry points for companies to establish a moat.
Success depends on leveraging strengths in specific layers of the AI stack or integrating AI capabilities across multiple layers.
Gennaro is the creator of FourWeekMBA, which reached about four million business people, comprising C-level executives, investors, analysts, product managers, and aspiring digital entrepreneurs in 2022 alone | He is also Director of Sales for a high-tech scaleup in the AI Industry | In 2012, Gennaro earned an International MBA with emphasis on Corporate Finance and Business Strategy.
