Glossary term
ASIC (Application-Specific Integrated Circuit)
A chip designed for one specific workload rather than general-purpose computing; the hyperscaler answer to NVIDIA GPU dependence.
An ASIC is an integrated circuit designed for one specific workload rather than general-purpose computing, trading flexibility for efficiency. In AI, custom ASICs like Google's TPU and Amazon's Trainium let hyperscalers cut cost and reduce NVIDIA dependence on high-volume internal workloads. ASICs differ from GPUs (programmable, general) and FPGAs (reconfigurable) by hard-wiring a fixed function into silicon. See Custom Silicon 101.