OpenAI says ChatGPT and Codex are now helping engineers build hardware

OpenAI's coding agent is moving from software into chip design and verification, with partners reporting large time savings OpenAI’s AI tools have spent most of their public life writing code, drafting emails and explaining spreadsheets. Now the company wants credit for something heavier: hardware. In a post on X, OpenAI said ChatGPT and Codex help engineers design and test hardware. From a million lines of code to chip verification The research behind the update starts with software, where Codex has had the most practice. OpenAI’s internal team reportedly used Codex agents to ship a software beta containing approximately 1 million lines of code. That beta included over 1,500 merged pull requests. The code in that beta was created solely by Codex agents, according to the findings. The estimated result was a 10x reduction in time compared to writing it by hand. Outside partners are reporting similar multiples. NVIDIA reported a 10x speedup in end-to-end machine learning workflows using Codex powered by GPT-5.5. The more interesting numbers come from chipmaking. A large semiconductor client saw roughly 48% time savings in directed test generation, a step in chip verification. Verific...