The Full Stack Behind Abundant Intelligence

OpenAI's compute strategy treats the full stack—data centers, custom silicon, frontier models, developer platform, and products—as one integrated system where gains at each layer amplify the others. The company disclosed first benchmark results for Jalapeño, its proprietary inference chip, which outperformed commercial alternatives on peak throughput per kilowatt and token latency across GPT-OSS 120B, DeepSeek R1, and Kimi K2. OpenAI actively manages a multi-vendor hardware portfolio spanning Microsoft, NVIDIA, AWS, AMD, Broadcom, Cerebras, CoreWeave, Oracle, SB Energy, and SoftBank, optimizing each workload for the strongest capability-to-cost ratio rather than committing to a single supplier. On the Artificial Analysis Coding Agent Index, GPT-5.6 Sol achieved a benchmark high while using 54% fewer output tokens than a leading rival, translating directly into lower per-task cost for enterprise customers. The piece invokes Jevons paradox to argue that efficiency gains will expand total AI consumption and economic activity rather than simply reduce spend, framing OpenAI's vertical integration as a compounding structural advantage.