OpenAI and Broadcom announce chip designed for LLM inference at scale

OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT and Codex and the models those tools utilize, and Broadcom, an established silicon supplier, have announced a new chip called Jalapeño, designed specifically for large language model inference in data centers.

The chip is intended to be deployed at large data centers, both companies claim this is just the first generation in a long-term project that will see chips refined over time.

Broadcom says that this ASIC (Application-Specific Integrated Circuit) was designed from scratch for LLM inference, based on “detailed insights” from the company’s conversations with researchers at OpenAI, and that the chip’s development was informed by OpenAI’s own roadmap for future models and products. The design and production of the chip took nine months.

The promise is that this chip is more specialized for the current needs of LLMs than those that inference systems currently run on in existing data centers.

OpenAI claims that “early testing shows that Jalapeño will deliver performance per watt substantially better than current state-of-the-art,” but notes that it is not done measuring performance, and that a “detailed technical report will be presented in the coming months.”

Until then, we don’t have many details to go on.

The company, which is known for its ChatGPT and Codex services and harnesses, hopes to ultimately own the full stack behind its models and products, reducing dependence on outside companies like Nvidia and ostensibly providing better performance or efficiency thanks to vertical integration.

More generally, OpenAI and its competitors are interested in custom silicon because it’s another way to potentially squeeze out more capacity amid a global compute crunch, as competing companies scramble for limited data center capacity.

While Broadcom was already a successful chipmaker for customers building out compute infrastructure, it has seen substantial movement recently as it has built new business around providing custom chips to hyperscalers and the teams building frontier models during the current AI boom.

Both companies claim Jalapeño chips will be deployed in data centers by the end of this year.