OpenAI reveals its first AI processor: Jalapeño

OpenAI has unveiled Jalapeño, its first custom-designed AI processor developed in partnership with Broadcom. Designed for AI inference, the chip aims to power ChatGPT and reduce the company's reliance on Nvidia's scarce GPUs.

OpenAI has just revealed a new “intelligence processor” chip for AI servers made in partnership with Broadcom. The chip, called Jalapeño, is designed to power current and future large language models, according to an announcement on Wednesday.

OpenAI’s first custom chip is made for the servers processing ChatGPT requests.

Jalapeño is an ASIC (Application-Specific Integrated Circuit), meaning it’s designed for a specific purpose: AI inference. With AI inference, models process a user’s request to run an agent like Codex or offer a response from ChatGPT, while AI training involves a model consuming vast amounts of data to inform its responses.

It comes just nine months after OpenAI revealed that it would team up with Broadcom to make its own chips, helping reduce the company’s reliance on the GPUs offered by Nvidia that are in limited supply. In an interview with Reuters, Broadcom CEO Hock Tan says it matches the performance of Nvidia’s Blackwell chips and Google’s Tensor processing units. Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon are among the other AI companies that have also launched custom-designed AI chips recently to power their servers for either training or inference, while still trailing Nvidia’s chips on overall performance.

OpenAI calls Jalapeño the “first step in a multi-generation compute platform,” which it expects to deploy by the end of 2026. “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,” OpenAI says.

Source: The Verge AI