Layer 1
Infrastructure
Electricity, chips and very large buildings. Everything starts here.
AI computation consumes electricity and produces heat. Electricity does not make anything intelligent by itself, but nothing in the layers above runs without it. In a large project a grid connection can be as hard a constraint as the supply of chips, and in Europe it is often the harder of the two.
What happens in this layer
01
A data centre is more than servers
It needs a dependable grid connection, backup power, cooling, physical security and fast network links to the outside world.
02
Chips are not only graphics cards
Ordinary processors, GPUs or other accelerators, memory chips to hold the model's numbers, and networking silicon to move data between machines.
03
The bottleneck is rarely the arithmetic
If memory or the network is too slow, an expensive chip sits and waits. How much of the time the hardware does useful work is what sets the price.
04
A supercomputer is a large group of machines
Thousands of chips joined by a very fast network so that they behave as one. When the traffic between them stalls, all of it stalls.
A common misconception
Key terms
Whole glossary →Articles on this topic
What one AI question actually uses
The bottle-of-water claim comes from a real study whose result changed meaning as it travelled. What it measured, what production measurements now show, and why two honest numbers can differ by a factor of a hundred.
Finland's data centre boom and the queue for the grid
Over three gigawatts under contract and 50,000 megawatts as enquiries. What the numbers actually mean, and where the real bottleneck is.