09 · Hardware & Infrastructure
Compute
Raw processing power
Shorthand for processing power — the chips and time on them. It's become the central currency of AI: who has the most largely determines who can train the biggest models. Scaling laws turn compute directly into capability.
Concrete example
“We're compute-constrained” means a lab has more ideas than chips to run them on.
Why it matters
Why companies spend hundreds of billions on it — and the metric that defines the competitive map.