I'm under 18, broke, and I just designed an open-source AI chip. Here's the full story.

I don't have a team. I don't have funding. I don't have a lab. I have a laptop, an internet connection, and an obsession with chips. This is the story of T1C — Tier 1 Chip — and why I built it. It started with a frustration. Every time I read about AI hardware, it was the same story. NVIDIA charges $30,000 for an H100. TSMC charges millions for a custom fab run. Apple Silicon is beautiful but completely closed. Intel, Qualcomm, AMD — all of them — locked behind NDAs, closed architectures, and billion-dollar relationships. I kept thinking: why does no one make an open-source AI chip that a real person can actually fabricate? Not a toy. Not a demo. A real architecture with real specs, real physics, and a real path to silicon. So I built one. T1C uses Digital In-Memory Computing — D-IMC. Instead of sending data back and forth between memory and processor (the classic Von Neumann bottleneck that kills every conventional AI chip), computation happens near the memory itself. Less data moveme