OpenAI says its Jalapeño chip offers spicy performance
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OpenAI released fresh benchmarks Tuesday that show its new Jalapeño chip delivering industry-leading performance and energy efficiency when serving several open source models.
Why it matters: It's part of a trend of AI model creators developing their own chips to cut costs, meet demand and reduce dependence on industry giant Nvidia.
State of play: OpenAI said that the benchmarks show Jalapeño outperforming chips from Nvidia and others when running DeepSeek R1, the 1-trillion-parameter version of Kimi K2.5 and OpenAI's latest open source model.
- OpenAI says it expects to have a limited number of Jalapeño-based systems in place this year, with greater capacity next year. Meanwhile, it says it is deep in development on a second-generation chip with plans starting to take shape on a third version.
Yes, but: OpenAI's chip isn't designed for training new models, meaning the company is still highly dependent on Nvidia, among others.
- "We're going to need a lot of compute," OpenAI VP of hardware Richard Ho said in an interview. "And Jalapeño is part of that. Cerberus is part of that. Nvidia is part of that. AMD is part of that."
The big picture: Most of OpenAI's rivals either have or are said to be developing their own chip designs. Google has its TPU line, including chips for both training and inference, while Amazon and Microsoft also have their own AI chip designs
- Anthropic confirmed earlier this month it is looking to build its own in-house chip design effort.
Between the lines: Although OpenAI demonstrated Jalapeño's performance on open source models to compare it to rival chips, the company says it has no plans to offer the chip to others.
- "We have so much need for it that we can't imagine when we would be able to [sell them to anyone else]," Ho said.
What we're watching: How much of OpenAI's overall compute ends up coming from Jalapeño and its successors in the coming years.
