Synopsys and OpenAI have announced a strategic partnership that brings together OpenAI’s advanced AI capabilities with Synopsys’ EDA tools and Agentic AI capabilities to revolutionise the design of semiconductors.
The companies signed an expansive, multi-year agreement to jointly develop GPT-Synopsys, a specialised model, optimised to use Synopsys EDA tools to perform semiconductor design workflows. The agreement includes a revenue sharing arrangement and go-to-market collaboration to jointly make GPT-Synopsys available to customers worldwide.
Today, Agentic AI technologies connect general-purpose models to EDA tools to run chip-design workflows. The next leap, with this partnership, is to make frontier models experts in using EDA tools: learning to run the tools as expert engineers, interpreting their outputs, and iteratively optimising designs using the tools. This integration will make the model a native expert user and enable engineers to explore more design alternatives and optimise power, performance, and area (PPA) to rapidly deliver more sophisticated designs.
“The future of semiconductor engineering requires dramatic acceleration of the chip design process without compromising PPA or first-time-right silicon. This agreement will expand access to Synopsys’ advanced design capabilities and the underlying, ground-truth engineering tools required to bring increasingly complex chips to market,” said Sassine Ghazi, President and CEO of Synopsys. “Together with OpenAI, we’re bringing frontier intelligence to chip design to help more companies develop and accelerate advanced silicon, while maintaining the rigor and trust required for manufacturing success.”
“We’re using our most advanced technology to improve the systems that power AI,” said Greg Brockman, President and Co-Founder of OpenAI. “With Synopsys, we’re bringing that work to chip design, helping engineers explore more designs and get to a working chip faster. By helping them build better chips, we can build better AI and bring it to more people.”
GPT-Synopsys to revolutionise AI-native chip design
GPT-Synopsys brings together OpenAI frontier models with Synopsys’ EDA technology and domain expertise, enabling the specialised model to reason about chip design and verification, and to directly operate Synopsys’ tools. Engineers will delegate design objectives – from PPA optimisation to timing and verification closure – with agents running tools, interpreting results, implementing changes, and iterating toward verified outcomes for engineer review. GPT-Synopsys will run on OpenAI-hosted infrastructure, will be designed to interoperate with customer agent harness systems, and will be deeply integrated with Synopsys.ai and the Synopsys Autopilot, Agentic AI platform. Early technology engagements are underway with leading semiconductor customers.
The joint service offering will provide the bundled compute, model, and licenses, while ensuring customer-specific design data is protected. GPT-Synopsys will feature enterprise-grade security, governance, and access controls. Customer data is not used to train the model, is encrypted at rest and in transit, and can be managed through configurable retention, audit, and permission controls.
