OpenAI and Broadcom unveil custom AI inference chip Jalapeño

OpenAI and Broadcom this morning unveiled their first custom AI accelerator chip named "Jalapeño," positioning it as a purpose-built processor for large language model (LLM) inference, rather than the more general GPUs offered by the likes of Nvidia or AMD. According to its creators, Jalapeño is designed to support workloads behind ChatGPT, Codex, the API and future agentic products, though both OpenAI's and Broadcom's news releases position it as a product that could be made available to external AI firms as well — "built from the ground up for current and future LLMs across the industry." Jalapeño's engineering timeline set a blistering pace for the semiconductor industry, moving from early schematics to fabrication readiness within a brief nine-month window, when new processor development cycles are typically measured in years. Indeed, the OpenAI and Broadcom partnership itself was only publicly announced in October 2025.

The companies attributed this speed to a deep software-hardware co-development process that actively used OpenAI's own models to accelerate parts of the chip design. After receiving an early physical model on Wednesday, OpenAI outlined plans to begin rolling out these processors across active data centers by the end of this year. OpenAI says it has already begun testing running at least one of its prior generation models, GPT-5.3-Codex-Spark, on the chips at a production workload, though in a test environment.

The release marks a major strategic expansion for the ChatGPT creator as it attempts to build the full computational stack required to make advanced AI faster, more reliable, and more accessible. There remain, of course, many outstanding questions — including how the new Jalapeño chip performs compared to direct competitors, its costs, and its manufacturing viability. Why OpenAI Built an ASIC To understand why OpenAI is moving into chip design, it helps to look at the architecture.

Jalapeño is an Application-Specific Integrated Circuit, or ASIC. Unlike a GPU, which can handle many types of workloads, an ASIC is tuned for narrower uses, as industry experts note. That narrower focus can make it cheaper and more efficient for specific AI tasks, though less adaptable than Nvidia-style GPUs.

In Jalapeño's case, OpenAI is starting from a clean design focused on modern LLM serving, instead of adapting a broader accelerator to fit its needs. The company says the architecture is shaped by its experience running large-scale AI products and is meant to reduce unnecessary data movement while better matching compute, memory and networking resources. Broadcom is contributing core silicon implementation and networking technology, including Tomahawk networking silicon, while Celestica is helping with board, rack and system integration.