Insight Innovation: OpenAI wants to get out of its dependence on Nvidia with its own chip

San Francisco, Munich. The name sounds like marketing, but it's an inside joke: OpenAI's first own AI chip is called "Jalapeño" because the development team calls itself "Hot Peppers". “We are engineers and we don’t take ourselves too seriously,” says Richard Ho, chip boss at the California AI laboratory.

There is a hard calculation behind the funny name: OpenAI wants to reduce costs with Jalapeño and reduce its dependence on the most important supplier Nvidia. If the plan works, the highly loss-making start-up will become significantly more competitive. “Jalapeño could be the first real attack on Nvidia’s dominance,” says Martin Geißler, chip expert at consulting firm Argon & Co.