OpenAI's JalapeñO Chip Outperforms Nvidia Blackwell in Inference as AI Safety Startup Alice Raises $140M

OpenAI's custom inference chip, codenamed JalapeñO, has topped Nvidia's Blackwell in some inference benchmark tests, a notable development in the intensifying AI chip race that also saw Bloomberg highlight broader competitive pressures across the semiconductor space. On the security front, AI safety startup Alice raised $140 million to expand stress-testing of advanced models, with CEO Noam Schwartz citing recent incidents involving frontier models from OpenAI and Anthropic as sharpening industry attention on vulnerability identification before real-world harm occurs. Elsewhere in enterprise AI, Dell's presence at the Six Five Summit underscored a market shift from AI pilots to full production deployments, Intel flagged a pivot toward return-on-investment and data control as the new priorities for enterprise customers, and Oracle outlined a move toward distributed cloud architectures driven by AI workloads.

AMD was identified by analysts as potentially having found a new major AI growth engine, while Amazon was characterized as a sleeper beneficiary of the broader AI boom. On the infrastructure side, Bloom Energy and photonics-focused funds were highlighted as potential winners from surging AI data center power demand. Apple's new AI-powered Mac Mini was framed by Barron's as a strategically critical product for the stock, and Intuit faces a double-edged dynamic as AI simultaneously threatens and potentially enhances its core business.