Layer 6: Inference & Compute — The Agentic Economy

Layer 6: Inference & Compute is the computational engine of the Agentic Economy — the cloud platforms and specialized providers that run AI models at the scale the agentic economy demands.

AI-Native Compute

A new category of cloud providers has emerged specifically to serve AI workloads. CoreWeave became one of the fastest-growing cloud companies by specializing in GPU compute. Groq built custom LPU chips for ultra-fast inference. Fireworks AI, Together AI, and Replicate provide optimized inference APIs for open-source models. Lambda Labs and Nebius offer GPU cloud built for ML workloads. fal specializes in media model inference.

The scale is extraordinary: xAI's Colossus and Stargate represent some of the largest GPU clusters ever assembled, purpose-built for training frontier models.

Hyperscale Cloud

The established cloud giants remain critical infrastructure. AWS, Azure, GCP, and OCI provide the majority of enterprise AI compute. Their managed AI services — AWS Bedrock, Azure AI, Google Vertex AI — make it easy to deploy agents at scale while leveraging existing enterprise cloud relationships.