OpenAI's Jalapeño chip beats Nvidia superchips on power and latency
Two hardware stories today, both about who sets the price of running AI: OpenAI's first custom inference chip just posted benchmark numbers ahead of Nvidia's best, and one of autonomous trucking's quietest operators just bankrolled its expansion.
OpenAI's custom Jalapeño chip delivered 1.5–1.9x more AI work per watt than Nvidia's GB200 and GB300 superchips, with 1.7–3.6x lower end-to-end latency, according to results the company presented at the Hot Chips conference on Tuesday. The numbers come from InferenceX, an inference benchmark run by research firm SemiAnalysis, tested across GPT-OSS 120B, DeepSeek R1 and Kimi K2.5 1T. OpenAI hardware chief Richard Ho called it a "very, very significant performance advance over state of the art," noting that most systems force a trade-off between throughput and latency — Jalapeño escapes it by keeping each model's working state next to the compute serving it, instead of shuttling data across the machine mid-response.
The caveats matter as much as the headline. These are OpenAI-commissioned results on a benchmark its chip was tuned for, and the comparison ran against Blackwell-generation Nvidia systems — while Jalapeño ships only in small volumes late this year and ramps through 2027, by which point Nvidia will have moved too. Still, the direction is the news: an ASIC co-designed with Broadcom, built purely for inference, beating general-purpose GPUs on their own economics metric is the scenario Nvidia's biggest customers have been waiting for. Ho was careful to say Nvidia remains one of OpenAI's "very good partners" and that Jalapeño won't replace the whole fleet — which tells you OpenAI expects its own silicon to carry most of the inference load, not all of it.
Self-driving truck startup Gatik raised $200 million — its largest round yet — led by Qatar Investment Authority and Koch Disruptive Technologies, two months after signing a multi-year deal to run driverless Frito-Lay deliveries for PepsiCo across Texas, Arizona and Arkansas. Millennium Management, ARK Invest and Intact Private Capital joined the round, bringing Gatik's total funding to roughly $500 million since it emerged from stealth in 2019. The company says it holds $600 million in contracted revenue and operates dozens of fully driverless box trucks on commercial routes for Walmart, Kroger, Loblaw and Tyson Foods. While robotaxi operators still burn cash per ride, middle-mile freight has quietly become the corner of autonomy that actually gets paid.
What to watch: whether anyone outside OpenAI reproduces the Jalapeño numbers independently — and what Nvidia's next generation looks like before the 2027 volume ramp.
If a first-gen startup chip can nearly double the work per watt, how safe is Nvidia's pricing power? Tell us in the comments.
