A self-guided descent through 27 strata

Every AI answer
begins as sand.

Between a quartz seam in North Carolina and a sentence on your screen sit roughly 27 layers of civilisation — crucibles and crystal pullers, tin-plasma light sources, copper damascene, stacked memory, cold plates, gas turbines, all-reduce collectives, preference data, attention heads, and finally a person deciding whether the answer was worth anything. This is the whole chain, one layer at a time, with the companies that own each link.