OpenAI is reportedly getting closer to producing its own in-house artificial intelligence chip as it seeks to gain leverage over existing manufacturers and continues to expand its data centers.

According to sources referenced by Reuters, the company is in the final months of finalizing the design for the in-house chip, with plans for the chip to be sent for fabrication at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. this year.  The report says OpenAI is aiming to have the chip in mass production by 2026.

Exactly what the OpenAI AI chip design will look like is unknown, but there have been previous reports, including in October that OpenAI was working with both Broadcom Inc. and TSMC on the chip. Previous suggestions have included that OpenAI is not looking to replace GPUs such as those provided by Nvidia Corp. but instead is looking to design a specialized chip that will undertake inference, the process of applying trained models to make predictions or decisions on new data in real-time applications.

Chips that support inference are needed as more tech companies use AI models to undertake more complex tasks. Currently, OpenAI relies heavily on Nvidia’s GPUs for training its models, a process that requires immense computational power to refine algorithms using vast datasets. However, inference requires different chip capabilities that are optimized for speed and energy efficiency rather than raw computational power.

While the technical idea behind the chip is solid, tech manufacturer politics is also seemingly playing a role in the development of the chip, with Reuters noting that the chip “is viewed as a strategic tool to strengthen OpenAI’s negotiating leverage with other chip suppliers.”

Those motivations aside, the exercise will not be a cheap one for OpenAI, even if it is a company where a $500 million investment — the estimated cost of designing the chip — is not much more than a rounding error. OpenAI has raised $17.9 billion to date, including a record-setting round of $6.6 billion in October. It was also reported in late January that OpenAI was seeking to raise a new round of $40 billion on a $340 billion valuation.

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