AI Accelerator

An AI accelerator is a general term for chips designed specifically to handle AI computation. Training and running AI models takes an enormous amount of calculation, and the CPUs in ordinary computers aren't efficient at this kind of work. AI accelerators are chips built specifically to process these calculations fast.

The most famous example is NVIDIA's GPU. Originally made for gaming graphics, GPUs turned out to be a great fit for AI calculations and became a core component of the AI era. Google's TPU, Apple's Neural Engine, and Qualcomm's NPU are all AI accelerators too, and big tech companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta are building their own AI chips as well.

The reason AI accelerators show up in the news so often is simple: the bottleneck in the AI race ultimately comes down to chips. No matter how good an algorithm is, it's useless without a chip to run it on. NVIDIA GPU shortages, US-China semiconductor export controls, and the race to develop in-house chips — all of these stories are really about AI accelerators.

"Big Tech's push to develop its own AI accelerators is challenging NVIDIA's dominance" — this refers to the trend of companies building their own chips to reduce dependence on GPUs.