OpenAI fired the starting gun for the AI race in late 2022 with the launch of ChatGPT and has since become one of the most valuable startups in the world, reaching hundreds of millions of users every day. Its success, however, has depended on a web of partnerships with other companies that make the silicon chips upon which its AI systems depend.
On Wednesday, OpenAI took its biggest step yet towards full technological independence with the unveiling of a new AI chip, dubbed Jalapeño, that it developed in collaboration with U.S. chipmaker Broadcom.
In a blog post, the company described Jalapeño as an “Intelligence Processor” and said it moved OpenAI closer to becoming a “full-stack” AI platform, which is industry-speak for controlling the production of all of the hardware and software components necessary to build models and make them accessible to users. Jalapeño is not a GPU—the class of chip made famous by Nvidia and the one most commonly used by tech developers to train and run AI models—but an application-specific integrated circuit, or ASIC. As its name suggests, an ASIC is designed to perform more specialized tasks than a GPU, which is more general-purpose.
The post also said that by being able to tap into its own supply of in-house chips, OpenAI would be able to deliver cheaper products and minimize wait times when demand is particularly high. “By designing more of the stack ourselves, we can serve more intelligence with greater efficiency and keep pushing advanced AI toward broader access,” OpenAI president and cofounder Greg Brockman said in a statement. The company currently buys silicon mainly from Nvidia but also has partnerships with Amazon, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), and Cerebras.
In October, OpenAI and Broadcom announced their plan to build enough racks of custom-made AI chips to supply ten gigawatts of power, enough to power roughly seven and a half million homes. The companies now plan to implement Jalapeño chips into a full-scale production setting: “This is just the beginning of a multi-generation roadmap,” Broadcom 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.”
In its announcement on Wednesday, OpenAI said the development of Jalapeño took nine months from start to finish, marking “what we believe to be the fastest ASIC development cycle ever achieved in high-performance advanced semiconductors.” That speedy development process was enabled in part by OpenAI’s own AI systems, according to the blog post.
“The same models served to users are helping improve the infrastructure used to run future models,” the company wrote. “If AI can help engineers design better chips faster, it can lower the cost of compute across the industry and help democratize access to advanced AI.”
AI is also increasingly being used to help software engineers train new and more powerful models, a process known in tech circles as “recursive self-improvement.” The operative word there is “recursive”: If AI is able to continually improve its own abilities by writing and altering its underlying code, that could in theory allow it to become so sophisticated that it escapes human control—an “intelligence explosion” with potentially catastrophic consequences for humanity.
Both OpenAI and Anthropic have called for the creation of an international oversight committee to prevent such an outcome, if necessary, by enforcing an industry-wide slowdown on the development of new models.
