OpenAI has begun testing its first in-house AI chip, affectionately nicknamed Jalapeño, marking the company’s most concrete step yet toward building its own silicon. The chip is purpose-built for inference, the computationally intensive process of actually answering your ChatGPT questions, rather than training models from scratch.
Inside Project Nexus
The chip effort falls under a broader initiative called Project Nexus, a collaboration between OpenAI and Broadcom that was announced in October 2025. The partnership’s ambition is staggering: up to 10 gigawatts of AI accelerators over time.
The Jalapeño chip is being designed under the leadership of Richard Ho, a former Google engineer, and will be fabricated at TSMC using the advanced 3nm manufacturing process. It employs a systolic array architecture, a design well-suited for the repetitive matrix math that dominates inference workloads.
The first phase of Project Nexus targets 1.3 GW of compute power, which carries an $18 billion price tag. Broadcom’s financial backing reportedly hinges on Microsoft purchasing roughly 40% of the chip’s output, or OpenAI finding alternative buyers to fill that gap.
