Since the ChatGPT moment nearly four years ago, OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman saw that compute infrastructure would become an important battlefront. Earlier this week, OpenAI unveiled its custom inference chip: Jalapeño. By designing a custom chip, OpenAI can bring down the cost of serving its models to consumers and improve performance per watt. While OpenAI might be a little bit behind rival Anthropic on coding performance, it is ahead on the infrastructure side, having gobbled up more compute than Anthropic, which is now partnered with SpaceX for compute resources. After this week’s announcement, OpenAI also has a head start on the custom chip front.