OpenAI’s Jalapeño chip lands on TIME’s Best Inventions of 2026 list

OpenAI’s first homegrown AI chip has picked up some hardware of a different kind. Jalapeño, the inference accelerator OpenAI built with Broadcom, was named to TIME’s Best Inventions of 2026 list on October 15. What Jalapeño actually is OpenAI first unveiled Jalapeño on June 24, 2026. The company describes it as its debut “Intelligence Processor,” developed alongside Broadcom and manufacturing partner Celestica. Technically, it’s a custom ASIC, or application-specific integrated circuit. The silicon is designed around a single workload — inference — rather than adapted to it after the fact. The spec sheet, translated Jalapeño delivers up to 13.4 petaflops of 4-bit compute. It pairs that with 232 GB of memory and 15.4 TB/s of bandwidth. On power, the chip runs at or below 550 W sustained. Its maximum rating is 700 W. Benchmark results published on August 25, 2026, showed Jalapeño doing 1.5 to 1.9 times more AI work per watt than Nvidia systems. The chip reportedly went from design to tape-out in nine months. The people and the plan The project brings together OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, OpenAI hardware VP Richard Ho, and Broadcom CEO Hock Tan. Their partnership went public in October 2025...