The AI accelerator

technology

The specialised processor — graphics processing units, and the tensor-oriented designs that followed them — on which essentially all frontier training runs. Deep learning became practical partly because the linear algebra it needs happened to match hardware built for real-time graphics, an accident of fit that the industry has spent a decade converting into deliberate design. Two properties of the supply chain matter more to this Journey than any specification. Fabrication of the leading-edge nodes these parts require is concentrated in a very small number of facilities, most of them in Taiwan, with capacity at the leading nodes reported by trade press as fully committed through 2026; and the parts are subject to export controls that make their distribution a matter of policy rather than of markets. A capability that depends on a device made in one place and licensed by one government is not distributed the way software is.

A technology is not a place. Drawing it on a map would assert something about the world that no stored fact supports.