Chip design software maker Synopsys has entered into a multi-year strategic partnership with OpenAI aimed at transforming semiconductor design workflows, with the two parties set to jointly develop artificial intelligence models dedicated to chip design.

On September 30, Synopsys announced the partnership with OpenAI at an investor summit, with the two sides set to jointly develop AI models for the chip business.

The model will be named GPT-Synopsys, and it will be specially trained and tuned to take on chip design tasks. These tasks range from describing chip circuits in a code-like language all the way to determining how to lay out billions of transistors on a small piece of silicon.

Under the agreement, OpenAI will pay Synopsys subscription fees for tool licensing, and the two parties will share revenue based on the chip design improvements achieved when customers use the product. Following the announcement, Synopsys shares rose more than 7% at one point during intraday trading, before trimming gains in late trading to close up 4.78%.

OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman said GPT-Synopsys will help engineers cut weeks or even months from chip design cycles and bring more chips to market.

Synopsys CEO Sassine Ghazi emphasized that the partnership is structured so that it will not cannibalize the existing business, but will instead bring incremental value to the company.

Partnership Framework: Subscription Fees Plus Revenue Sharing

According to details Ghazi disclosed in an interview with Reuters, OpenAI will initially pay a training subscription fee to learn how to use Synopsys electronic design automation (EDA) tools.

Once GPT-Synopsys is officially launched to customers, the two parties will share revenue proportionally based on the model's actual improvement in chip design.

Ghazi said the agreement was specially structured to ensure the new product does not compete with Synopsys' existing business. "This will be incremental to our business, because we are providing more value to customers."

GPT-Synopsys will run on OpenAI's own infrastructure and be deeply integrated with Synopsys' Synopsys.ai and Autopilot agent platforms.

The two sides said leading semiconductor customers are already participating in early technical collaboration. Customer design data will be protected by enterprise-grade security, will not be used for model training, and will be encrypted throughout transmission and storage.

Technical Positioning: AI Model Becomes an "Expert User" of EDA Tools

The core design philosophy of GPT-Synopsys is to transform frontier AI models from general-purpose tools into specialized experts in the chip design field.

According to the two parties' description, existing agentic AI technology can already connect general models to EDA tools to run design workflows, and the key step taken by this partnership is to enable the model to truly master the ability to operate EDA tools like a senior engineer, including interpreting tool output and optimizing design plans through iteration.

At the specific application level, engineers will be able to delegate design objectives such as power, performance and area (PPA) optimization, timing closure and verification to agents, with the model autonomously running tools, interpreting results, implementing modifications and iterating until verification results are ready for engineer review.

However, Ghazi emphasized that GPT-Synopsys outputs still need to be reviewed by Synopsys' traditional computational verification tools. He said:

The model needs these guardrails to verify physical laws and perform validation with the highest fidelity, which is what we call signoff or ground truth, and it is an indispensable step.

Outlook: Fiscal 2027 Growth Target Exceeds Market Expectations

Synopsys also raised its guidance at the investor summit. The company now expects revenue growth of 15% in fiscal 2027, while LSEG data showed analysts' average estimate was only 11.19%.

Ghazi said at the event that the partnership with OpenAI will expand the reach of Synopsys' advanced design capabilities and broaden its market access to increasingly complex chip designs.

On OpenAI's side, Greg Brockman positioned the partnership as improving the computing infrastructure that drives AI itself through frontier AI technology:

By helping engineers build better chips, we can build better AI and bring it to more people.