All terms
Hardware & Systems
ASIC
A chip custom-built for one job, like running a specific company's AI models, instead of general-purpose computing.
Definition
An ASIC is a chip designed and wired for one specific task rather than general-purpose computing. In AI, that usually means a chip built around one company's own models and software, trading the flexibility of a general-purpose GPU for higher efficiency on that narrower job. Google's TPUs were an early example, and more companies, including OpenAI and Amazon, have since built their own inference-focused ASICs to cut cost and power use at large scale, at the expense of being locked into that one company's hardware.