Waymo has developed its own custom AI chip for its self-driving vehicles, aiming to process camera data faster and more efficiently than off-the-shelf components allow. The move puts the Alphabet-owned robotaxi firm alongside rivals such as Tesla in designing bespoke silicon for autonomous driving, reflecting the industry's push for lower latency and greater reliability as vehicles must interpret sensor data and react within milliseconds to stay safe.

Built on TSMC's 5-nanometre process, the chip is designed to run both conventional convolutional neural networks and transformer-based models, and its design draws on more than 200 million miles of Waymo's driving data. The company says it can deliver over 1,000 TOPS of AI performance, replacing the Intel FPGAs it previously relied on for sensor processing. Each vehicle carries two of the ASICs for redundancy, with liquid cooling shared with the car's own cooling system, and Waymo is expected to reveal further details at the Hot Chips conference next week.