OpenAI and Broadcom Unveil 'Jalapeño' AI Accelerator Chip Design

OpenAI and Broadcom have unveiled the design for Jalapeño, their first jointly-made chip. The pair of companies announced plans to collaborate on a making a custom "AI accelerator" in October 2025. In its blog post today, OpenAI called Jalapeño its "first Intelligence Processor: an accelerator architected around OpenAI's vision for the future of LLM inference." In other words, the processor is designed to run its large language models.

The AI company claims that so far, Jalapeño is offering "performance per watt substantially better than current state-of-the-art" in chip technology. The blog post did hedge that final performance testing is still underway, and a more thorough technical report on the chip's performance specs will be released in the coming months. The next stage will be to see Jalapeño put to use in data centers, with the initial deployment slated to begin in late 2026.

This marks OpenAI's first foray into making the chips that it relies on for training and operating its ChatGPT models. By controlling more components across the process of running an LLM, the company says it can make its business more efficient and increase how much people will be able to effectively use ChatGPT tools.

OpenAI also wrote that "Jalapeño was co-developed from initial design to manufacturing tape-out in just nine months," adding that the "speed reflects deep software-hardware co-development with OpenAI's engineering teams, Broadcom's silicon implementation expertise, and the use of OpenAI models to accelerate parts of the design and optimization process."

Jalapeño is the first AI accelerator from the Broadcom and OpenAI partnership, and the two have said the collaboration is meant to be a "multi-generation compute platform" designed to "make advanced AI faster, more reliable, and more accessible to more people."