OpenAI’s Jalapeno chip outperformed the GB300 on power and speed, according to OpenAI

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.

Chip chief Richard Ho says it does two jobs usually split between parts. High throughput to serve many customers cheaply, and low latency for those who care about response time.

What it ran on is worth noting. OpenAI tested a small open model of its own plus third-party models from DeepSeek and Moonshot, with the widest advantage on Kimi, the largest one it tried.

The roadmap is already moving. A second version tapes out in the coming months and a third generation exists in concept.

Ho was careful about who is listening. “Nvidia is a really good partner, and we continue to need a lot of Nvidia,” he said.

Every large buyer is now doing this. Anthropic is designing its own silicon and Google has been talking to Marvell about custom inference chips.

Europe is buying the merchant product. The EU has committed around €20bn to AI gigafactories that will purchase hardware on the open market, weeks after Nvidia told customers server prices are rising more than 15%.

Its answer to this is smaller than the problem. Europe’s most prominent AI chip company is Axelera, whose Samsung-backed accelerator targets edge devices rather than the data centres the gigafactory money is building.