As far as I know, it’s usually called an uncountable noun.
…but ‘computation’ is also uncountable, and your second sentence seems to be perfectly fine to me.
Your examples do not constitute an argument. You haven’t articulated the (purported) difference between the two words; you’ve just decided arbitrarily that some sentences don’t work, and not elaborated or explained at all.
I can make up words too, and provide example sentences: “karrotz are delicious” works. “carrots are delicious” doesn’t. “inside the karrotz” doesn’t work. “inside the carrots” does.
I don’t actually think there is any difference. The above comment about ‘brospeak’ was snarky but I do think it’s more of a cultural phenomenon than a semantic one — unless someone is willing to kindly explain the difference rather than just rolling their eyes!
What exactly is wrong with the sentence ‘this would require huge amounts of computation’? Saying ‘compute’ seems more to be a synonym of ‘computation’ that’s caught on recently than a useful gap-filling addition to the language. Again: reasoned arguments please. Or just ‘we think it sounds cool so we use it’ — that’s fine, too.
EDIT: pondering briefly, perhaps one could argue the difference is something like ‘you can own compute, but you can’t own computation.’ ‘Compute’ is the capacity to carry out computation. …although ‘compute’ seems to be used to refer to the ‘abstract’ computation being done as well as the computational resources, so I don’t know.
I’m stretching it. To be honest I’m not sure it’s a useful (or even real) distinction. I think it’s a matter of fashion, and that’s fine and normal.
“I have 1000 flops of compute” - works.
“I have 1000 flops of computation” - doesn’t work.
“That compute failed” - doesn’t work.
“That computation failed” - works.
They’re different.