Term · Checked October 29, 2026

GPU

A GPU (graphics processing unit) is a chip first built to speed up graphics. Its strength at parallel math also makes it the main chip for training and running AI models, which is why AI clusters are counted in GPUs.

Source: Wikipedia

Compute & chips

Related terms

HBM (high-bandwidth memory): Stacked memory placed next to an AI chip to feed it data fast. Its supply is often the bottleneck in making AI chips.
AI data center: A building full of GPUs, power and cooling, used to train and run AI models. Colossus is xAI's.
Training compute (FLOP): Training compute is the total count of floating-point operations (FLOP) used to train an AI model. It is a count of work done, unlike FLOPS, which measures operations per second.

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