Owning the Layer Below | Friday, June 26, 2026
Three moves this week, one logic: control of the layer beneath you.On Wednesday, OpenAI took delivery of the first samples of Jalapeño, its first custom chip, designed end to end in nine months with Broadcom. The headline number, per Broadcom CEO Hock Tan, is roughly 50% lower cost per inference than the AI GPUs everyone else rents. Read that again. The most capital-intensive company in private technology, the one projecting $14 billion in losses this year, just decided the cheapest path forward runs through silicon it controls.
