TechnicalAI glossary
Exaflop (FLOPS)
A unit of computing power: one exaflop equals a billion billion floating-point operations per second (FLOPS). The classic trap: these figures depend on the precision used. At low precision, common in AI, the same machine posts far more operations than at high precision, which makes comparisons between announcements often misleading.
In other words
Counting coins without saying whether they are cents or euros: the figure is accurate, the comparison is meaningless.
Alyriaz articles that mention it
- The week of extraordinary claims
Week in review, 7–13 September 2026: Navier-Stokes, attribution disputes, Mistral, Suno v6, and data centres leaving the grid.
- What is an exaflop? Measuring computing power, and why comparisons mislead
Computing power announcements are multiplying in exaflops. We explain this unit, why the same hardware can show very different figures, and how to read these announcements.
- China aims to quadruple its computing power by 2030
China's Ministry of Industry has unveiled a plan targeting 9,800 exaflops of computing capacity by 2030, with 3.8 trillion yuan in investment. We break down the figures and what they imply.