AI Infra 40

We are delighted to introduce the Lazard AI Infra 40 list which showcases a selection of some of the most exciting growth-stage AI infrastructure companies we have identified through hundreds of discussions with CEOs and investors. 

4 key market trends emerged through our research and company interviews:

Rethinking the Stack for the AI Age

The optimal architectures of hardware, software and associated tooling appear to be shifting significantly for the AI Era and technical efficiency. Architectures will likely become increasingly driven by AI use-case (e.g., specialized for edge compute) and flexible (agnostic to both underlying chips and foundational models).

Focus on AI Sustainability

Rapidly increasing energy requirements of AI training and inference is leading to a focus on architectural energy efficiency and is increasing the need for optimized energy and AI infrastructure integration.

Looming Data Constraints

Limited supply of high-quality language data is leading to opportunities in alternative and synthetic data sources.

The Dawn of Autonomous AI Agents

Co-pilot agents are just the start of harnessing the power of LLMs for agents. We see emerging opportunities in multi-agent and autonomous agent models as a possible key theme over the next 12 months.

This report looks at AI infrastructure as a space for potential investments at the growth stage. McKinsey1 estimates that while up to US$25.6 trillion p.a. in economic value could be added to the global economy by Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) and its applications, the build-out of essential AI infrastructure is fundamental to realizing this potential: “infrastructure is destiny”, as one OpenAI executive recently put it.

The current phase of AI infrastructure growth is however being hampered by a series of stark shortages: of hardware (GPUs and other AI chips), of sustainable energy sources, of high-quality training data and of talent. We believe that technologists from many companies including our VGB AI Infra 40 list are aiming to respond with innovative rethinking of hardware, software, data and tooling stacks, increasingly led by AI use cases, including the growing need for edge compute.

Lazard AI Infra 40 List

We are delighted to introduce the AI Infra 40 list of selected companies arranged alphabetically by segment. Detailed profiles of the AI Infra 40 companies are available in the PDF download.