OpenAI and Broadcom recently unveiled Jalapeño, OpenAI’s first Intelligence Processor, an accelerator architected around OpenAI’s vision for the future of LLM inference, and the first AI accelerator in a multi-generation compute platform that the companies are building together to make advanced AI faster, more reliable and more accessible to more people.
OpenAI said it designed the chip from scratch around its deep understanding of LLM fundamentals, informed by its roadmap of models, kernels, serving systems and product needs, with partners Broadcom and Celestica, helping industrialize the platform through chip implementation, board, rack system integration, high-performance networking and scalable production systems.
Jalapeño to outperform current state-of-the-art chips
OpenAI explained that Jalapeño is designed with the flexibility to work with all LLMs guided by OpenAI’s insights into the inference needs of current and future AI models across the industry. Engineering samples of the Jalapeño chip are running ML workloads in the lab at production target frequency and power, including GPT‑5.3‑Codex‑Spark.
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 AI chips. The architecture reduces data movement and balances compute, memory and networking resources to achieve realized utilization much closer to theoretical peak performance.
Broadcom’s silicon implementation and networking technologies, including Tomahawk networking silicon, helped bring the platform to large-scale production.
“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,” said Greg Brockman, President and Co-Founder of OpenAI.
“By designing more of the stack ourselves, we can serve more intelligence with greater efficiency and keep pushing advanced AI toward broader access,” he added.
OpenAI to make Jalapeño well-suited for interactive LLM products at scale
OpenAI said Jalapeño is a blank-slate design for modern LLM inference, not a general-purpose accelerator adapted from earlier AI workloads. It is informed by the systems OpenAI runs every day across ChatGPT, Codex, the API and future agentic products, while also being designed for current and future LLMs across the industry.
The goal is to combine the power and throughput of today’s leading AI accelerators with latency closer to the fastest specialized inference systems, making Jalapeño well-suited for interactive LLM products at scale.
“Jalapeño was designed from the ground up for LLM inference using detailed insights from our close collaboration with OpenAI researchers,” said Richard Ho, who leads OpenAI’s hardware program. “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.”
Chip to enable deployment of gigawatt-scale data centers with Microsoft
Jalapeño was co-developed from initial design to manufacturing tape-out in just nine months, and the custom AI accelerator program represents what the company believes to be the fastest ASIC development cycle ever achieved in high-performance advanced semiconductors. That 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.
“Our collaboration with OpenAI represents a fundamental commitment to scaling the physical infrastructure required for the next decade of AI,” said Hock Tan, President and CEO, Broadcom.
“This is just the beginning of a multi-generation roadmap. By co-developing our industry-leading silicon directly with OpenAI, we are enabling the deployment of gigawatt-scale data centers with Microsoft and other partners beginning in 2026,” he added.
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