OpenAI’s first custom-designed silicon chips allegedly will probably be manufactured by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Firm (TSMC), the identical outfit churning out processors for Nvidia, Apple, AMD, Intel, and others.
United Each day Information Group, one in all Taiwan’s largest media orgs, this week mentioned trade sources declare OpenAI has booked capability for TSMC’s A16 course of node, which is concentrating on mass manufacturing within the second half of 2026.
A16 is a 16 Angstrom or 1.6-nanometer manufacturing course of. “In contrast with N2P,” TSMC’s 2nm-class course of node, “A16 affords 8-10 % velocity enchancment on the identical Vdd [working voltage], 15-20 % energy discount on the identical velocity, and 1.07-1.10X chip density,” in keeping with the manufacturing facility large.
The chip manufacturing goliath didn’t reply to a request for remark.
Apple is claimed to have been the primary main buyer to have reserved A16 manufacturing capability.
The iPhone maker in June introduced a partnership with OpenAI to combine ChatGPT into iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS Sequoia by way of a service known as Apple Intelligence. Whereas Apple says that lots of the machine studying fashions utilized by Apple Intelligence run on-device, the iBiz additionally plans to deploy a service known as Non-public Cloud Compute, operating on Apple Silicon, to make use of server-based AI fashions to deal with advanced requests.
There isn’t any indication presently that OpenAI anticipates Apple, which has its personal Neural Engine {hardware} for accelerating AI workloads, will find yourself utilizing OpenAI silicon when it turns into accessible.
OpenAI didn’t reply to a request for remark.
OpenAI has reportedly explored investing in its personal chip fabs to the tune of $7 trillion, however now these ambitions seem to have been scaled again. As a substitute of negotiating with TSMC to construct a devoted wafer manufacturing facility, which is ridiculous when you concentrate on it, the AI mannequin maker is believed to be pursuing the fabrication of its personal machine-learning accelerating ASIC with the assistance of Broadcom and Marvell on a TSMC node.
That appears extra real looking and regular: A software program firm partnering with a chip design firm to have a {custom}, app-specific processor fabbed by a contract producer. Broadcom helped Google design the online large’s TPUs in any case.
UDN expects TSMC to fab Broadcom- and Marvell-designed ASICs on its 3nm node and its subsequent A16 course of. Ergo it is probably not a shock that TSMC would fab a 1.6nm chip for OpenAI with Broadcom or comparable aiding within the design advert testing.
OpenAI is claimed to be engaged on a funding deal that might see the corporate valued at $100 billion. The AI super-lab, which as of June had a reported annualized income of $3.4 billion, now says it has greater than 200 million weekly lively customers of ChatGPT, double the quantity cited final November.
And it claims that 92 % of Fortune 500 corporations are utilizing OpenAI’s merchandise to a point. Additionally, API utilization is claimed to have doubled because the launch of GPT-4o mini in July. However, OpenAI took greater than $10 billion in pledged assist from Microsoft to get so far, amongst different investments, and should dive $5 billion into the crimson this 12 months as a consequence of its non-trivial neural web coaching and employees prices. ®
