TechCrunch Mobility: The custom chip driving Waymo’s robotaxi ambitions
Waymo has revealed that a custom-built silicon chip is central to its sixth-generation self-driving system, offering a clearer picture of how the company plans to make its robotaxi business commercially viable. The disclosure comes as Waymo opens its next-generation Ojai robotaxi to all riders in Los Angeles, Phoenix and San Francisco, and follows the firm's repeated claims that the newer vehicle is cheaper to build, operate and maintain than its predecessors.
The chip, a 5nm ASIC, is designed to process the huge volume of raw sensor data—including feeds from the Ojai's 13 high-fidelity cameras—before it reaches the core software "brain" of the driving system. Waymo says the chip delivers more than 1,000 TOPS of computing performance, putting it roughly on par with Nvidia's DRIVE AGX Thor automotive processor, and says this gives the vehicle the speed and reliability needed to navigate complex, high-density urban environments. The company also named several hardware partners involved in its compute stack, including AMD, Micron, Nvidia, Samsung, Sandisk, Socionext and TSMC.
- Waymo built a custom 5nm chip for its next-gen robotaxi system
- Chip processes sensor data at over 1,000 TOPS, rivalling Nvidia's Thor
- Move highlights Waymo's push towards cheaper, profitable robotaxi operations
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Waymo is one of the biggest players in self-driving cars, running a robotaxi service where passengers ride in vehicles with no human driver. It grew out of a project started by Google and is now owned by Alphabet, and it currently operates in several US cities including Phoenix, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Its vehicles rely on a mix of cameras, sensors and onboard computers to sense the road and make driving decisions in real time.
For self-driving software to work safely, the car needs to process enormous amounts of information from its cameras and sensors almost instantly, which requires powerful onboard computer chips. Many companies building autonomous systems buy general-purpose chips from suppliers such as Nvidia, rather than designing their own. Building a custom chip, tailored specifically to a company's own software and hardware, is a costly and technically demanding undertaking, but one that can potentially make vehicles cheaper to run and more capable.
This matters because robotaxi services have so far struggled to prove they can be profitable at scale, given the high cost of the hardware and computing power each vehicle needs. How Waymo designs and sources the technology inside its cars offers a sense of whether, and how, it might bring those costs down as it tries to expand its service to more riders and more cities.