OpenAI Asked The Chip Industry To Build Faster. Then It Built Its Own Chip Team.

Two years ago, shortly after Richard Ho, OpenAI’s vice president of hardware, joined the AI giant, he traveled to Asia with CEO Sam Altman and a cadre of researchers to meet with the biggest chip manufacturers in the world: TSMC, Samsung and SK Hynix.

Altman’s message was blunt. OpenAI’s already insatiable demand for computing power was only going to grow and the semiconductor industry had to start moving faster — a lot faster. “Look, in a few years we’re going to need a lot more silicon,” Ho recalls Altman telling them. “Please start building more fabs.”

Those companies did build more fabs, the fabrication plants where computer chips are physically assembled. But it wasn’t enough to satisfy OpenAI’s bottomless appetite, Ho tells Forbes. It was partly because of that crunch that OpenAI decided to just build its own hardware, and Altman tapped Ho to build a team from scratch. Two years later, the company announced its first semiconductor, an inference chip named Jalapeno. In June, OpenAI said it had built the chip in nine months and plans to start getting them into data centers by the end of the year.

“One of the constraints that we’re under now is that if we had started building [more fabs] like two and a half years ago, we would be in a much better position,” Ho tells Forbes.

Before joining OpenAI, Ho, a Google veteran, helped design the search giant’s first TPU chip, custom-built silicon tailored specifically for artificial intelligence. He sat down with Forbes for a wide-ranging conversation, where he talked about building the team, choosing Broadcom as its semiconductor partner over Nvidia and AMD, and how the doomerism debate has trickled into his world of building chips. This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Richard Nieva: I’ll start with a simple one: Why is the chip named Jalapeno?

Nieva: Why does OpenAI need to build a chip?

Nieva: You said it’s a small team. How big is it exactly?

Nieva: How many gigawatts?

More from Forbes