OpenAI bets big on energy-hungry custom chips to scale ChatGPT and Sora
OpenAI is partnering with chipmaker Broadcom to design and develop custom AI chips and systems requiring 10 gigawatts of power. The collaboration, involving OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, aims to build infrastructure to support the company’s expanding user base and power-intensive applications.
This partnership follows previous agreements OpenAI secured with high-profile chip companies Nvidia and AMD. These deals were part of a strategy to obtain more computing resources for its services, which have seen considerable growth. The company’s ChatGPT application now serves 800 million weekly users. An OpenAI executive also noted on the social media platform X that the recently released Sora video-generation app is experiencing a faster growth rate than ChatGPT did.
In a press release announcing the deal, Sam Altman, co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, stated, “Partnering with Broadcom is a critical step in building the infrastructure needed to unlock AI’s potential and deliver real benefits for people and businesses.” The deployment of the resulting AI accelerator and network systems is scheduled to begin in the second half of 2026. Sam Altman was pictured in Berlin, Germany, on September 25, 2025.
The scale of the 10-gigawatt power requirement is comparable to the electricity consumption of a large city. According to Reuters, this level of power usage is equivalent to that of 8 million U.S. households, which has drawn attention to the environmental impact of AI development. Altman had previously commented on the energy demands of his company’s products, stating that an average query on ChatGPT consumes as much energy as a lightbulb uses in a couple of minutes. He also indicated that generating realistic video clips with more advanced models, such as Sora 2, would be significantly more power-intensive.
By creating its own custom AI accelerators, or chips, OpenAI will assume a larger role in the hardware required to operate services like ChatGPT. An OpenAI press release noted that through this initiative, the company “can embed what it’s learned from developing frontier models and products directly into the hardware, unlocking new levels of capability and intelligence.”
Following the public announcement of the partnership, Broadcom’s shares experienced a 12% surge on Monday morning. The deal came after Broadcom CEO Hock Tan disclosed during a company earnings call that the firm had secured a new $10 billion customer. At the time of Tan’s statement, it was believed that the new customer was OpenAI.
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