TechCrunch Mobility: The custom chip driving Waymo's robotaxi ambitions

Waymo has opened its next-generation Ojai robotaxi to all riders in Los Angeles, Phoenix and San Francisco, and the company says a key reason is a custom compute approach. Waymo shared that it built a 5 nm custom ASIC chip designed to process incoming raw sensor data before it reaches the system’s core “brain.” With 13 high-fidelity cameras on the vehicle, Waymo claims the chip delivers more than 1,000 TOPS of performance—placing it in a similar range to Nvidia’s DRIVE AGX Thor. The chip is presented as enabling fast, safe reactions in dense cities, supported by partners including AMD, Micron, Nvidia, Samsung, SanDisk, Socionext and TSMC.