Two of the biggest semiconductor companies made announcements last week that might seem unrelated, but are linked. Intelannounced its acquisition of Israeli startup Mobileye, which makes chips and software for self-driving cars. Nvidiaannounced the latest generation of a system intended to speed up machine learning, which is necessary for artificial intelligence.

Both were driven by “specialized computing,” that is, the transforming of specific software tasks into physical silicon chips instead of depending on an ever-faster...