Tom's Hardware's AI Chip Design Week centers on how artificial intelligence is reshaping chipmaking. The flagship piece is an unredacted interview with OpenAI hardware VP Richard Ho about Jalapeño, the inference ASIC co-developed with Broadcom. Ho explains how AI-assisted design helped the chip beat Nvidia on efficiency and pushes back on the misconception that it only runs OpenAI models.
The week also surveyed the broader landscape of agentic AI in chip design. Synopsys introduced Autopilot, a platform for its AgentEngineer aimed at chip design workflows, with general availability slated for the end of 2026. Cadence, Synopsys, and Siemens are all pitching autonomous engineers, but experts warn that AI-driven design could make patent infringement harder to detect.
In other hardware news, Intel was granted a patent for embedding MicroLEDs in chip packaging, which could enable optical interconnects through TGVs — and, as Tom's Hardware notes, glowing RGB CPUs. Separately, Nvidia launched the Open Agent Safety Platform, a hardware-and-software stack using BlueField sentry hardware to quarantine rogue AI agents in milliseconds.
Finally, a report from Epoch AI says the cost of AI is falling nearly 50% per quarter, outpacing Moore's Law. That trend, combined with the week's chip-design announcements, suggests AI is simultaneously becoming cheaper and more deeply embedded in the hardware it runs on.