ASIC
A chip built to do one job extremely well, giving up the flexibility to do anything else.
An ASIC, short for application-specific integrated circuit, is a chip designed for a single task. A normal processor or graphics card is a general-purpose machine: it will run whatever you ask of it, which means a lot of its silicon exists to handle cases you are not using right now. An ASIC throws all of that away. Because it only has to do one thing, it can do that thing far faster and on far less electricity.
In AI this matters because most models share one architecture, the transformer. Several companies now build ASICs with that design baked into the hardware, aiming to make running models much cheaper than a general-purpose graphics card can. The trade is real: if the field ever moves to a fundamentally different architecture, a general chip adapts and an ASIC does not.