Plain-English glossary
Short, plain meanings for words you will see on The Speki. Tap or hover over a dotted word on any page to see its meaning.
- 52-week range
- The lowest and highest price over the past year.
- Accelerator
- A special chip built to run one kind of work, like AI, faster than a regular processor.
- AI agent
- AI software that can take steps on its own, like booking, coding or searching, not just answer a question.
- AI factory
- A data center built mainly to train and run AI models, turning power and data into AI output.
- AUM
- Assets under management: the total money a firm invests for its clients.
- Backlog
- Work customers have signed contracts for that the company has not delivered or billed yet.
- Capex
- Short for capital expenditure: money a company spends on long-lasting things like buildings, data centers and machines.
- Compute
- The computing power, mainly chips in data centers, needed to run software and AI.
- Data center
- A building full of computers that store data and run online services.
- Earnings
- A company's profit. An earnings report is its regular update on sales and profit.
- Free cash flow
- The cash a company has left after paying its bills and its big building costs.
- GPU
- Graphics processing unit: a chip that does many math steps at once. It is now the main chip used to train AI.
- Guidance
- A company's own forecast of its future results.
- HBM
- High-bandwidth memory: very fast memory chips stacked next to AI chips so they can move data quickly.
- Hyperscaler
- A company that runs huge cloud data centers, such as Amazon, Microsoft, Google or Meta.
- Inference
- When a trained AI model is used to answer a question or do a task.
- Leverage
- Using borrowed money to make a bigger bet. It can grow gains and losses.
- Liquidity
- How easily money or an asset can be turned into cash without changing its price much.
- MBS
- Mortgage-backed securities: bonds built from many home loans bundled together.
- Moving average
- The average price over a set number of recent days, used to smooth out daily swings.
- Sovereign AI
- AI systems a country builds and controls inside its own borders.
- Terminal value
- An estimate of what a business is worth far into the future, beyond a forecast's last year.
- TPU
- Tensor Processing Unit: a chip Google designed to run AI models.
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