Why a company lands in L3 and not L8 — and why not just use GICS.
GICS is the standard. Eleven sectors, 163 sub-industries, more than 50,000 companies, maintained by MSCI and S&P since 1999. It is careful, global, and better resourced than anything we could build. So why add another classification?
Because GICS answers a different question. It tells you what a company is: its legal structure, where revenue books, which index it belongs in. This map tells you what a company depends on and what depends on it — which suppliers it buys from, which customers it sells to, where it sits in a build-out.
Two companies in the same GICS sector can be four layers apart. Two companies four sectors apart can be adjacent links in the same chain. Both facts are invisible in a sector view.
Consumer Staples, Health Care and Financials have no entries: no direct role in this supply chain.
GICS classifies roughly 50,000 public companies across 127 markets. This covers a little over 1,200 — the companies with a direct role in the AI supply chain. Three GICS sectors have no entries at all.
That is not a gap we intend to close. A classification that tried to place every listed company into an AI stack would be placing most of them nowhere in particular. If a company has no position in this supply chain, the honest answer is that it is not in the map, and you should use GICS for it.
A company is placed by what it sells, not by what it is associated with. Revenue is the test. If most of it comes from designing chips, the company sits in Semiconductor — however much of the business is described in AI terms, and whatever the market narrative currently is.
This rules out a lot of companies that would otherwise crowd the interesting layers. A firm that mentions AI on an earnings call but earns from something else is not an AI Models company.
Plenty of large companies genuinely operate in several. They are assigned one primary layer by revenue and tagged into the others, so they appear where they belong without being counted twice in the layer returns.
Some placements are arguable, and it's better to say so than to imply a precision that isn't there. A cloud provider designing its own accelerators is genuinely both a cloud business and a semiconductor one. A contract manufacturer building server racks sits between two layers depending on which quarter you look at.
Where that happens the placement follows revenue and the ambiguity is recorded rather than hidden. A classification you can't interrogate is one you shouldn't trust.