As the industry embraces artificial intelligence, the need for chips ready for AI tasks has increased considerably in recent years. While Nvidia is currently the main supplier of AI chips, OpenAI (the company behind ChatGPT) wants to have its first custom chip ready by the end of the year.
OpenAI working on its own AI chip
As reported by Reuters on Monday, OpenAI has been “pushing ahead” with its plans to design and build its own AI-ready silicon by the end of this year. Sources familiar with the matter say the company is finalizing the design and plans to send it to manufacturing in the next few months. TSMC, which already supplies chips to Apple, is rumored to produce OpenAI’s first chip.
The report notes that “tape-out,” which is the final stage in the process of designing a new chip, costs “tens of millions of dollars” and can take up to six months before production begins. This is a critical stage as the first chips produced on a large scale could fail – and this would require redoing the whole process.
At first, the OpenAI chip would be used to run AI models with a “limited role,” but the chip also capable of training AI models and may be used for this purpose in the future. If all goes well, OpenAI engineers already have plans to develop even more powerful chips.
If OpenAI succeeds in building its own chip, the company will not only have more control over how it processes data for AI training, but will also reduce its reliance on Nvidia. Apple, for instance, currently uses Amazon chips to pre-train Apple Intelligence models. However, the company is also rumored to be working on its first custom server chip for AI tasks in partnership with Broadcom.
Other companies such as Meta and Microsoft have also been spending billions of dollars on AI infrastructure. At the same time, the latest AI model introduced by Chinese startup DeepSeek has shown the world that it’s possible to develop powerful AI models with fewer hardware resources.
Photo by Laura Ockel on Unsplash.
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