OpenAI used AI to write over half of its custom chip cores in Rust-like XLS language
prasanna_says · x · 2026-08-31
At Hot Chips '26, OpenAI revealed how it saved its custom chip, Jalapeño, by using a new hardware programming language called XLS to squeeze the layout into the schedule.
More than half of the chip's core was written in XLS. The team discovered that the AI models they wanted to enable were exceptionally good at writing programs in this language because it resembles Rust. This AI-assisted workflow allowed a small team to iterate rapidly and solve design fit issues that traditional methods could not address in time.
More from Infra
- NVIDIA and Sweden's Wallenberg launch Sferical One, a shared AI supercomputer — nvidia · 2026-10-16
- Next infra frontier: self-evolving systems that adapt and self-verify — _shreya_s · 2026-10-16
- Xiaomi's MiMo RL dashboard reveals $3.47M spent on just 30 training steps — bycloud · 2026-10-16
- Cerebras pushes disaggregated inference: heterogeneous prefill pools feeding wafer-scale decode — ai · 2026-10-16
- d-Matrix GA's Corsair rackscale, demos first public Attention-FFN disaggregation at 845 tok/s — ai · 2026-10-16
- Actual's inference engine hits 10k tok/s on NVIDIA DGX Station, GB300 case study — natesiggard · 2026-10-16