Before you can talk honestly about what is on the other side of the coast, you have to know what the ship sits on. The first few floors. The constraints. The ground.

Jensen Huang calls AI a five-layer cake. Energy. Chips. Infrastructure. Models. Applications. Every working application pulls on every layer beneath it. All the way down to the power plant.

Underneath the cake, three pillars hold it up. Energy. Compute. Data.

Energy is the floor. The bottleneck the AI race is bumping into right now. It is the one raw material that stays constrained. The way out is not more energy. It is better conversion. Compute solves it from above. Better chips. Better data centers. Better cooling. Energy is the limit only if you stand still. Move things to higher entropy. That is the rule.

Compute is its own triangle. Compute. Memory. Network. Every computer runs on these three. Different agents break on different corners.

Data is the third pillar. It is finally starting to arrive as a moat. Not the way people predicted. The data moat will not be a single proprietary database. It will live at the model boundaries. What each model has seen. What it has not. What its harness has been allowed to read and remember. Two agents built on different data behave differently in ways their users cannot always see. That asymmetry is the moat.

Above the pillars is the model layer. The thing the rest of the stack runs on. It is heading toward being utility-like. It is not there yet. Different models still feel different.

Above the model layer is the application layer. This is where things get shaky. It is the youngest part of the stack and the least settled. Context windows. Tool calling. Harnesses. Identity. Governance. Verification. Most of these are still being argued over.

One thing about this picture. Even today the layers are less neat than they look. To build chips you need metals. The mines that pull those metals out of the ground run on computers. The computers need power. New technology folds back into the technology that came before it. Every layer embeds in everything that already exists. Nobody fully maps it.

It only gets messier from here. Data is the first one to leak. An agent reads something fresh and remembers it. Suddenly there is data above the model layer, not just below it. Compute will follow when agents start spawning each other. Energy will get pulled from higher up too.

Treat the picture as a snapshot. The shape underneath is a web.

These are the constraints. Anything anyone claims about the agent economy has to respect them. Now we can look at what is being built on top.