AST Research, Inc. was a personal computer manufacturer, founded in Irvine, California, in 1980 by Albert Wong, Safi Qureshey and Thomas Yuen. In the 1980s AST designed add-on expansion cards, before shifting to a major personal computer manufacturer towards the 90's. By the late 1990s AST was acquired by Samsung, but was forced to close shortly after due to a series of losses.

AST's original business was the manufacture and marketing of a broad range of microcomputer expansion cards, later focusing on higher-density replacements for the standard I/O cards in the IBM PC. A typical AST multifunction card of the mid-1980s would have an RS-232 serial port, a parallel printer port, a battery-backed clock/calendar (the original IBM PC did not have one), a game port, and 384 KB of DRAM (added to the 256 KB on the motherboard to reach the full complement of 640 KB) - marketed under the product name 'SixPakPlus'. A similar expansion card was produced for the 8-bit Apple II, named the AST Multi I/O, which offered a serial and parallel interface, plus a battery-backed clock/calendar.