OpenAI has agreed to acquire Solaris Silicon, a two-year-old AI inference chip designer, for roughly $2 billion in cash and stock - its largest acquisition to date and a clear signal that the lab intends to build its own silicon.
Why Solaris
Solaris had demonstrated a prototype inference accelerator claiming 4x the tokens-per-watt of current-generation GPUs for transformer workloads, using a sparse-matrix architecture tuned for large language models.
"Compute is the constraint that defines everything we do. Owning the silicon is the only way to control it," an OpenAI spokesperson said.
The NVIDIA Question
The move puts OpenAI on a collision course with NVIDIA, its largest single supplier. OpenAI is expected to keep buying NVIDIA GPUs for training while gradually shifting inference to Solaris-derived chips by 2027.
The acquisition intensifies the broader custom-silicon race: Google's TPU, Amazon's Trainium, and Microsoft's Maia all point the same direction.
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