It is very near the bottom of Kanamori's chart. The very bottom of the chart is the level of a (strongly) inaccessible cardinals, which is the smallest large cardinal axiom. Right above the inaccessibles in the chart are the &alpha;-inaccessible cardinals. It turns out that the Universe Axiom (UA) is strictly weaker than the existence of a 2-inaccessible cardinal. In fact, &kappa; is 2-inaccessible if and only if &kappa; is regular and V<sub>&kappa;</sub> &#8871; ZFC + UA.

Specifically, a cardinal &kappa; is:

* *0-inaccessible* iff &kappa; is regular,
* *1-inaccessible* iff &kappa; is a regular strong limit of 0-inaccessibles,
* *2-inaccessible* iff &kappa; is a regular strong limit of 1-inaccessibles,
* etc.

So an inaccessible cardinal is exactly the same as a 1-inaccessible cardinal, which are also precisely the regular cardinals &kappa; such that V<sub>&kappa;</sub> &#8871; ZFC. If &kappa; is 2-inaccessible, then there are unboundedly many inaccessibles &lambda; < &kappa;. These are inaccessible in V<sub>&kappa;</sub> too, which is why V<sub>&kappa;</sub> satisfies UA.

Note that the existence of a 2-inaccessible cardinal &kappa; does not directly imply the Universe Axiom. Indeed, &kappa; may well be the last inaccessible cardinal, which means that there may be no universe that contains &kappa; itself. However, if &kappa; is 2-inaccessible then the universe V<sub>&kappa;</sub> does satisfy UA, which means that the existence of a 2-inaccessible proves the consistency of ZFC + UA.

Although UA is indeed a large cardinal axiom, there is no way to formulate UA as the existence of a *single* large cardinal. However, morally speaking, you can think of UA as saying "the class of all ordinals (viewed as a cardinal number) is 2-inaccessible." Of course, this doesn't make sense since the class of all ordinals is not a set, but this is exactly what &kappa; looks like when viewed from inside V<sub>&kappa;</sub>.