Clifford Chao has joined OpenAI as silicon lead, as the company ramps up its in-house silicon ambitions.

Chao spent the last four years as the lead ASIC engineer at Lightmatter, a silicon photonics compute and interconnect company.

Prior to his time at Lightmatter, Chao worked at Google for more than eight years, including on TPUs, network-on-chip, and memory systems. He also spent nearly 13 years at Texas Instruments.

At both Google and Lightmatter, Chao overlapped with Richard Ho, who left the latter company in 2023 to start OpenAI's silicon efforts.

The former TPU lead is the VP of hardware at OpenAI, and heads the team responsible for OpenAI's upcoming Jalapeño chip.

The 700W processor is set to be deployed in racks featuring 128 chips and pods with 2,048 ASICs. The 128-chip deployment is capable of 1.7 exaflops of 4-bit compute, with 27.5TB of HBM4. Each package has 15.4TBps of memory bandwidth.

An inference-focused chip, designed in partnership with Broadcom, Jalapeño is expected to be deployed in limited quantities later this year, and more widely deployed next year.

The company, which said that it used AI to help develop the chip, is developing follow-up models and is believed to be looking at training chips as well.