An abstract factory is meant to "provide an interface for creating families of related or dependent objects without specifying concrete classes.
The typical straight-out-of-the-book example is a Widget Factory; back in the day when the GoF was published, cross-platform GUI development was a bit of a hassle, so you could define an abstract widget factory class.
That class could have methods createWindow, createButton, createScrollBar etc. In turn, several implementations would be defined to produce Swing widgets or AWT or whatever. Then, depending on configuration, the different class would be instantiated.