AI Glossaryinfrastructure

GPU / TPU

Specialized processors designed for the parallel mathematical operations that AI models require for training and inference.

How It Works

GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) and TPUs (Tensor Processing Units) are the hardware that makes modern AI possible. Unlike CPUs that excel at sequential tasks, GPUs have thousands of cores optimized for the matrix multiplications that neural networks use. NVIDIA dominates the AI GPU market with its A100 and H100 chips. Google's TPUs are custom AI accelerators available through Google Cloud. For builders using AI APIs, you never interact with GPUs directly since the provider manages the hardware. GPU knowledge matters when: self-hosting models (you need to choose the right GPU), estimating costs (GPU time is the main cost driver), and understanding why AI APIs are priced the way they are. Cloud GPU pricing varies widely. An NVIDIA H100 on AWS costs roughly $30-40/hour. This is why API providers charge per token: they are amortizing GPU costs across millions of requests. For self-hosting, the breakeven point depends on your volume. As a rough guide, if you spend over $5,000/month on API calls for a single model, it may be worth exploring self-hosting on dedicated GPUs.

Common Use Cases

  • 1Understanding AI infrastructure costs
  • 2Self-hosting model deployment
  • 3Training custom models
  • 4Capacity planning for AI applications

Related Terms

Large Language Model (LLM)

A neural network trained on massive text datasets that can generate, understand, and reason about human language.

Inference

The process of running a trained AI model to generate predictions or outputs from new inputs, as opposed to training the model.

Model Serving

The infrastructure and process of hosting a trained AI model and exposing it as an API endpoint for real-time or batch inference.

Quantization

A technique that reduces AI model size and memory requirements by using lower-precision numbers to represent model weights, trading a small accuracy loss for major efficiency gains.

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