OpenAI says its Jalapeno inference chip, developed with Broadcom, outperformed Nvidia’s GB300 on AI work per unit of power and on response speed. It was not tested against Nvidia’s newer Vera Rubin hardware and is not designed for training.
OpenAI has published numbers for the chip it built to need Nvidia less. It says Jalapeno, developed with Broadcom, beat Nvidia’s GB300 on two measures, the amount of AI work handled per unit of power and the speed of returning an answer.
The company supplied its own caveats. Jalapeno was not tested against Vera Rubin, Nvidia’s newer generation which has just started shipping, and it cannot train models at all.
TNW flagged the obvious problem when the chip was unveiled. We wrote in June that vendor benchmarks deserve a raised eyebrow until independent numbers land, and these are still OpenAI’s numbers.
The power figure carries most of the weight. Jalapeno reaches its results at 700 watts, and electricity is the dominant running cost in any data centre.
