Foundations

AI Engineering Stack

The whole AI stack at a glance. Seven layers from infrastructure to applications. Which providers play at each, where the gaps are, and what it means for anyone building on top.

In this topic

Everything about the AI engineering stack

Reference

A complete map of the seven-layer AI stack (infrastructure / models / inference / connectivity / memory / agents / applications) and where each major provider operates. Google, Microsoft, Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic, AWS, xAI, Alibaba, Apple, plus the smaller specialists (Mistral, DeepSeek, Moonshot, Samsung) and the open-weight connective tissue (HuggingFace, Ollama, LM Studio, Msty, vLLM). Apple's hybrid model, the provider coverage heat map, the open-weight ecosystem as the shared layer, and what the cross-cutting trends (MCP winning, memory being the least mature layer, the agent battlefield) mean for builders.

Last updated May 16, 2026