Hot Chips 2026: OpenAI's Jalapeño AI ASIC unpacked — accelerator developed using AI achieves efficiency and throughput gains against power-hungry Blackwell

OpenAI made quite a splash back in June, when it unveiled its 'Jalapeño' AI accelerator and revealed that the chip reached tape-out in just nine months. At the Hot Chips conference, OpenAI disclosed more details about the architecture of its Jalapeño inference processor as well as shared its target and real-world performance numbers. The company claims its NUMA-style spatial architecture enables Jalapeño to outperform Nvidia's GB200 and GB300 in low-latency inference and in terms of performance-per-watt, while a 2,048-processor system scales to 27 exaFLOPS and 32 PB/s of aggregate memory bandwidth. (Image credit: OpenAI)