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Glossary term
An application-specific integrated circuit: a chip designed for one purpose, including custom AI chips.
An application-specific integrated circuit is a chip designed to do one job extremely efficiently. Google's TPUs and other custom AI accelerators are ASICs.
They can beat general-purpose chips on speed and energy for their target workload, but are costly to design and less flexible.
Custom ASICs let big AI users cut costs and reduce reliance on a single chip supplier.