OpenAI Drops Jalapeño Chip, Hopes Spice Cuts Nvidia From the Recipe 🌶️

OpenAI unveiled Jalapeño on Wednesday, its first custom artificial intelligence chip developed with Broadcom and built specifically for large language model inference. The chip marks OpenAI's most significant move yet toward controlling more of the hardware stack behind its AI models, including ChatGPT. "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 general-purpose AI chips, Jalapeño was designed specifically to run chatbots and other 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, and that 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 earlier reports of OpenAI's custom silicon program. Reuters previously reported that the company was planning to launch its first internally deployed AI chip to reduce reliance on Nvidia hardware, and in April, reports surfaced that OpenAI was also developing a chip designed for smartphones. Jalapeño 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.

"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." Major cryptocurrencies, including $BTC and $ETH, showed no immediate reaction to the announcement.