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Jensen Huang Unveils Five-Layer AI Architecture

What happened

At his keynote at the annual GTC 2026 Berlin conference on Oct. 21 local time, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said Nvidia has defined artificial intelligence as a new manufacturing industry that produces digital intelligence, or tokens, at scale, and unveiled a five-layer AI architecture dubbed the "Five-Layer Cake." The first layer is power and energy infrastructure that operates AI factories; the second comprises advanced computers and accelerated computing hardware that provide the foundation for AI processing; the third is AI factory infrastructure combining power and computing to produce tokens at scale, including neoclouds and communication networks; the fourth layer consists of AI models spanning various domains and scales, including language, biology, chemistry, physics, robotics and animation; the fifth layer comprises applications that integrate the resulting tokens into industries and enterprises. Huang said that, unlike conventional software tools, AI is a factory and a machine that produces intelligence on its own, and that the five-layer AI architecture connecting energy to applications would become the core infrastructure of the new industrial revolution. He emphasized that Europe must move beyond being merely a consumer of AI and become a producer of digital intelligence, urged European companies and governments to build independent production ecosystems rather than remain technology consumers, and said Europe has the capabilities to build the entire five-layer AI architecture independently. This is a strategic vision statement; the source contains no specific product, price or supply data.