OpenAI just put Nvidia on notice. The company disclosed benchmark results for its custom-designed AI chip, codenamed Jalapeño, showing it significantly outperformed Nvidia’s GB300 processors across multiple metrics during both internal and public testing on the InferenceX platform.
The numbers are hard to ignore: Jalapeño delivered 1.5 to 1.9 times more AI work per watt compared to Nvidia’s GB300 processors, and reduced end-to-end latency by 1.7 to 3.6 times across several AI models, including the GPT-OSS 120B and DeepSeek R1.
What Jalapeño actually is
The chip is an application-specific integrated circuit, or ASIC, designed in collaboration with Broadcom and manufactured by TSMC. Unlike Nvidia’s general-purpose GPUs that handle everything from training massive models to running inference at scale, Jalapeño is purpose-built exclusively for AI inference.
The chip’s sustained power consumption sits at or below 550W, though it’s rated for 700W. Broadcom CEO Hock Tan went further, claiming Jalapeño matches the performance of Nvidia’s Blackwell architecture and Google’s TPU while offering roughly a 50% cost advantage on a per-token and per-kilowatt basis.
