❯ Waymo Develops In-House 1000 TOPS Automotive Chip, Reducing Dependence on Nvidia and AMD

IN-HOUSEGoogle-owned Waymo has unveiled an in-house automotive AI chip with compute power exceeding 1000 TOPS, manufactured by TSMC on a 5-nanometer process, and already mass-produced and installed in the next generation of robotaxis. It is an ASIC dedicated to autonomous driving, with performance in the same range as Nvidia’s latest autonomous driving platform.

WHYThe official blog cites latency as the rationale: the chip must ingest data from Waymo’s self-developed sensors and run models that determine what’s happening around the vehicle in an extremely short time. A general-purpose GPU is overkill and slow on this pipeline. The new model from Waymo’s recent partnership with Geely’s Zeekr is being switched over to this chip. Bloomberg reports that the in-house move also reduces supply dependence on Nvidia and AMD.

COSTIn the per-vehicle cost of a robotaxi, the compute platform is one of the few big-ticket items that hasn’t yet been driven down. By bringing this in-house, Waymo has reset the floor for per-kilometer operating costs. For peers still using third-party solutions, the constraint on expansion speed shifts from “can we get chips” to “are we willing to spend a few years making one.”

▪ SIGNALAutonomous-driving companies making chips aren’t chasing peak compute—they’re after holding both latency and per-vehicle cost in their own hands.