AI accelerator

An AI accelerator, deep learning processor, or neural processing unit is a class of specialized hardware accelerator or computer system designed to accelerate artificial intelligence and machine learning applications, including artificial neural networks and machine vision. Typical applications include algorithms for robotics, Internet of Things, and other data-intensive or sensor-driven tasks. They are often manycore designs and generally focus on low-precision arithmetic, novel dataflow architectures or in-memory computing capability. As of 2024, a typical AI integrated circuit chip contains tens of billions of MOSFET transistors.

AI accelerators are used in mobile devices, such as neural processing units (NPUs) in Apple iPhones or Huawei cellphones, and personal computers such as Apple silicon Macs, to cloud computing servers such as tensor processing units (TPU) in the Google Cloud Platform. A number of vendor-specific terms exist for devices in this category, and it is an emerging technology without a dominant design.

Graphics processing units designed by companies such as Nvidia and AMD often include AI-specific hardware, and are commonly used as AI accelerators, both for training and inference.