The Chat Box Is Only the Top Floor
Your chatbot has a supply chain. A solarpunk look at the models, chips, factories, data centers, resources, and partnerships behind the chat box.
AI Friday. Setting foundations.
The chat box is only the top floor.
You open ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or DeepSeek. You type a prompt. An answer appears.
But underneath that interaction is a supply chain.
Companies building models.
Software connecting those models to tools.
Chips running the computation.
Factories manufacturing those chips.
Data centers housing them.
Electricity and cooling keeping everything running.
NVIDIA and AMD design many of the chips used for AI. TSMC manufactures many of those designs. Cloud providers make computing capacity available to the companies building the products we use.
And these relationships go beyond buying and selling hardware.
OpenAI’s partnerships with AMD, Oracle, and Amazon connect the software to chip deployments, data center construction, and cloud infrastructure.
So when I hear “AI company,” I’m learning to look beyond the app.
Who supplies the chips?
Where does the computing happen?
What powers it?
Who finances the infrastructure?
As I build with AI, those questions matter alongside what a model can do. They help explain what it costs, how reliably it runs, and who can access it.
The tower in this image is a simplified map. Some companies operate on several floors.
I gave it a solarpunk setting because I like imagining a future where technology and the living world fit together. Building that future means understanding the physical resources behind the interface.
The cloud lives somewhere.
And the companies supplying the lower floors help shape what gets built upstairs.
Day 4 of documenting what I learn building with AI.
Farewell until tomorrow.