Tech companies
41 Tech companies terms explained simply, ordered from basic to advanced. Start at the top if the topic is new to you.
Basic
Adobe
The company behind Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, Acrobat and the PDF format.
Alibaba
China's giant of online marketplaces, which also runs a major cloud.
Amazon
An online store with its own delivery network, and the company that runs AWS.
AMD
The chip designer that competes with Intel in CPUs and with NVIDIA in GPUs.
Anthropic
The AI company behind Claude, built around making models safe and useful.
Apple
The company that sells the iPhone and the Mac, plus the services that run on them.
ByteDance
The Chinese tech company behind TikTok and its recommendation engine.
ChatGPT
OpenAI's chat assistant, the app that brought AI chatbots to the general public.
Cisco
The company that makes much of the network gear connecting offices to the internet.
Claude
Anthropic's family of AI models, and the assistant app built on them.
Cloudflare
A global network that sits in front of websites to make them faster and safer.
DeepSeek
A Chinese AI lab whose open-weight models showed that top AI could be built for less.
Gemini
Google's family of AI models, and the assistant app that carries the same name.
GitHub
A website where teams store their code with Git and work on it together.
The search company that gives most products away and makes its money on ads.
Google Cloud
Google's cloud business: computing, storage, data and AI services rented by the hour.
Huawei
A Chinese company that makes mobile network equipment, phones and its own chips.
Hugging Face
The website where people share AI models and datasets, and the tools to use them.
IBM
A century-old computer company that sells software, consulting and mainframes.
Intel
The American company behind most PC and server processors for decades.
Mercado Libre
Latin America's largest online marketplace, with its own payments and delivery network.
Meta
The company behind Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, paid for by advertising.
Microsoft
The company of Windows and Office, now just as much a cloud company with Azure.
Mistral AI
A French company that builds AI language models, many of them with open weights.
Netflix
A streaming service, and the engineering it built to deliver video to the whole world.
NVIDIA
The company that sells the shovels of the AI gold rush.
OpenAI
The company that made ChatGPT and turned AI into a household topic.
Oracle
The company behind one of the most used business databases, now also a cloud provider.
Perplexity
An AI answer engine that searches the web and replies with a summary and its sources.
Qualcomm
Designs the chips, and owns key patents, that let phones talk to cell towers.
Salesforce
The company that sells, as an online subscription, the software to manage customers.
Samsung
Korean giant that sells phones and TVs, and makes much of the world's memory chips.
SAP
The German company whose software runs the back office of many large businesses.
Spotify
A Swedish streaming service for music and podcasts, free with ads or paid monthly.
Stripe
A company that lets websites and apps accept online payments with a few lines of code.
Tesla
An electric car maker that treats the car as a computer on wheels.
Xiaomi
A Chinese maker of phones and smart home gadgets, and more recently electric cars.
Intermediate
Arm
The British company that designs the processor blueprints inside almost every phone.
ASML
The Dutch company that builds the machines every advanced chip factory depends on.
Broadcom
An American chip designer behind data center networking, Wi-Fi and custom AI chips.
TSMC
The factory that makes the world's most advanced chips for everyone else.