Newsletters




OpenAI and Broadcom Debut LLM-Optimized Inference Chip


OpenAI and Broadcom are debuting “Jalapeño,” OpenAI’s first Intelligence Processor: an accelerator architected around OpenAI’s vision for the future of LLM inference.

According to the OpenAI and Broadcom, this is the first AI accelerator in a multi-generation compute platform the companies are building together to make advanced AI faster, more reliable, and more accessible to more people.

OpenAI 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 is designed with 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, the company said.

A detailed technical report on performance will be presented in the coming months. 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, help bring the platform to large-scale production.

“The world is moving to a compute-powered economy,” said Greg Brockman, president and co-founder of OpenAI. “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. By designing more of the stack ourselves, we can serve more intelligence with greater efficiency and keep pushing advanced AI toward broader access.”

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, the companies said.

Jalapeño is the first step in a multi-generation compute platform designed for initial deployment by the end of 2026 and expanding in the years ahead, combining OpenAI-designed accelerators with Broadcom silicon implementation, networking, and connectivity technologies; and Celestica’s board, rack, and system expertise.

For more information about this news, visit https://openai.com.


Sponsors