First Benchmarks Revealed for Jalapeño, OpenAI’s Clean-Sheet General Purpose AI Accelerator ASIC

By Nitin Dahad, EE Times | August 27, 2026

At a pre-Hot Chips media briefing this week, OpenAI’s VP of hardware, Richard Ho, revealed results of first benchmarks for its clean‑sheet ASIC designed specifically for large language models (LLMs). The company’s in‑house “Jalapeño” accelerator, developed with Broadcom and Celestica, targets both high throughput and low latency in the same architecture—while addressing what Ho framed as the real enemy in modern AI systems: data movement.

OpenAI announced the chip in June, stating it was built from the ground up for current and future LLMs across the industry, developed from design to production in nine months (which itself was accelerated by OpenAI’s models).

This week, the company revealed that the tests of the chip and the systems around it showed significant performance advances, with Jalapeño serving more AI work per unit of power, while also returning responses more quickly. “Jalapeño delivers both higher throughput and lower latency with one architecture, where existing hardware systems often have to make a tradeoff between the two,” OpenAI said in an official statement.

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