Silicon is starting to design silicon — how AI is being used in chipmaking, from EDA tools to OpenAI's Jalapeño and beyond

In late August, Architect Labs claimed it had designed a chip that was almost entirely developed by AI, an industry-first achievement. AI is already used to optimize floorplans, placement and routing, verification, and other stages of semiconductor development. Generative AI can assist engineers with RTL code, whereas emerging agentic systems can operate electronic design automation (EDA) tools, analyze results, identify problems, modify designs, and repeat the process with increasingly less human intervention. Meanwhile, human engineers still define and develop architectures and make fundamental design decisions that determine what a chip does and how it works.

This creates a curious feedback loop. Today's AI models run on processors designed by human engineers with growing assistance from AI; those models can then help design more capable processors for the next generation of AI systems. …