OpenAI Turns Up the Heat With Jalapeño, Its First Custom AI Chip - Decrypt

OpenAI Turns Up the Heat With Jalapeño, Its First Custom AI Chip

OpenAI on Wednesday unveiled Jalapeño , its first custom artificial intelligence chip, giving a spicy name to a project that could reshape how the company powers ChatGPT and future AI products .

Developed with Broadcom, the chip is designed specifically for large language model inference—the process that generates responses to user prompts—and marks OpenAI's most significant move yet toward controlling more of the hardware stack behind its AI models.

"Jalapeño is part of our long-term, full-stack infrastructure strategy to make compute more abundant, resulting in AI which is faster, more reliable, more affordable for people and businesses, and can be used to solve more important problems," OpenAI President Greg Brockman said in a statement. “By designing more of the stack ourselves, we can serve more intelligence with greater efficiency and keep pushing advanced AI toward broader access.”

Unlike many AI chips designed to handle a wide range of computing tasks, Jalapeño was built specifically to run chatbots and other AI systems powered by large language models. OpenAI said early versions of the chip are already being tested in its labs, including with GPT-5.3 - Codex -Spark. The company claims Jalapeño can deliver more computing power while using less energy than today's leading AI chips, though it has not yet released benchmark results.

The announcement confirms reports that OpenAI was building a custom chip program. Earlier this year, Reuters reported that the company was planning to launch its first internally deployed AI chip as it sought to reduce its reliance on Nvidia hardware. OpenAI’s chip ambitions gained further traction in April, with reports that the company was developing a chip designed for smartphones.

The chip is the first product in what OpenAI describes as a multi-generation compute platform expected to begin deployment in data centers later this year, with future generations supporting gigawatt-scale AI infrastructure with Microsoft and other partners.

“Our collaboration with OpenAI represents a fundamental commitment to scaling the physical infrastructure required for the next decade of AI,” Broadcom President and CEO Hock Tan said in a statement. “By co-developing our industry-leading silicon directly with OpenAI, we are enabling the deployment of gigawatt-scale data centers with Microsoft and other partners beginning in 2026.”

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