New OpenAI chip promises faster, cheaper AI than Nvidia’s

OpenAI said that its new Jalapeno chips performed better than Nvidia Corp.’s current lineup during testing, underscoring the company’s progress developing AI processors in-house.

In the tests, the Jalapeno processor led in two categories: the amount of AI work it could handle per unit of power and its speed at returning responses.

The semiconductor was measured against Nvidia’s GB300, which was the leading option on the public benchmarking system used in the test, OpenAI chip chief Richard Ho said in an interview Monday.

The maker of ChatGPT plans to start using the new chips to support its artificial intelligence models later this year, part of a broader push to build its own AI infrastructure. It joins a stampede of companies working to develop homegrown AI chips — a field currently dominated by Nvidia.

The new chip should significantly reduce costs for OpenAI as it rolls out more widely, Ho said on the Bloomberg Tech show Tuesday.

“It’s a really good chip — it should drop it by a lot,” he said. The company aims to handle more AI tasks with its own chips, as long as OpenAI can increase production of Jalapeno and the cost savings are as material as expected, he said.

OpenAI created Jalapeno in a partnership with Broadcom Inc., which makes custom chips for a variety of clients. The two companies, which announced their pact last year, touted the speed at which the processor was developed in June, saying it came together in record time.