OpenAI has unveiled its first custom artificial intelligence chip, Jalapeño, marking a major step in the tech giant’s efforts to build more of the computing infrastructure that powers its AI models and products, the company announced on Wednesday.

The chip, developed in partnership with semiconductor company Broadcom, is designed specifically for large language model (LLM) inference, which is the process through which AI systems such as ChatGPT generate responses to users.

OpenAI said Jalapeño is the first accelerator in a planned multi-generation computing platform intended to make AI services faster, more reliable and more affordable.

What OpenAI is saying

OpenAI said early testing indicates the chip will deliver a significant efficiency advantage over current industry-leading hardware, though final performance figures are still being measured.

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  • “While OpenAI is still measuring final performance, early testing shows that Jalapeño will deliver performance per watt substantially better than current state-of-the-art,” the company said, adding that a detailed technical performance report will be presented in the coming months.

Greg Brockman, President and Co-Founder of OpenAI, tied the chip to the company’s broader infrastructure ambitions.

  • “The world is moving to a compute-powered economy. 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,” he said.

Richard Ho, who leads OpenAI’s hardware program, said the chip was built entirely around the specific demands of large language model inference.

  • “We optimized the architecture around the kernels, memory movement, networking, and serving patterns that matter most for frontier AI models. Based on early testing, Jalapeño will efficiently execute our most important workloads close to the hardware’s theoretical limits,” he said.

Broadcom CEO Hock Tan described the partnership as part of a much longer-term infrastructure commitment.

  • “Our collaboration with OpenAI represents a fundamental commitment to scaling the physical infrastructure required for the next decade of AI. This is just the beginning of a multi-generation roadmap,” he said, adding that the collaboration would enable gigawatt-scale data centre deployments with Microsoft and other partners beginning in 2026.

More insights

Jalapeño was designed from scratch as a dedicated inference accelerator rather than adapted from general-purpose AI hardware, with OpenAI describing it as informed directly by the systems it runs daily across ChatGPT, Codex, its API and future agentic products.

  • Engineering samples of the chip are already running machine learning workloads in OpenAI’s labs at production target frequency and power, including the company’s GPT-5.3-Codex-Spark model.
  • OpenAI said the chip was taken from initial design to manufacturing tape-out in just nine months, a timeline the company described as the fastest ASIC development cycle ever achieved in high-performance advanced semiconductors, a pace it attributed partly to using its own AI models to accelerate parts of the chip design and optimisation process.
  • Jalapeño represents the first step in a broader multi-generation compute platform that OpenAI and its partners plan to begin deploying by the end of 2026, with further expansion planned in subsequent years.

What you should know

Earlier this month, Nairametrics reported that OpenAI announced it was preparing a major overhaul of ChatGPT.

This was its most significant product update since the chatbot’s debut in 2022, as the company seeks to evolve the platform into a broader AI-powered ecosystem, the Financial Times reported.

The redesign is expected to integrate coding capabilities, AI agents and third-party services into a single platform, transforming ChatGPT from a conversational assistant into what the report described as a “superapp.”