Waymo's custom 5nm chip ships in the Ojai robotaxi at over 1,000 TOPS
Waymo built a custom 5nm ASIC that processes raw sensor data before it reaches the driving system's main compute, delivering more than 1,000 TOPS — roughly Nvidia DRIVE AGX Thor range — and it rides in the Ojai robotaxi today, not a roadmap slide. With Ojai now open to all riders in Los Angeles, Phoenix and San Francisco and seven compute partners named including TSMC and AMD, the robotaxi race has shifted from map expansion to per-mile cost, and Waymo is answering that with its own silicon.
Source: techcrunch.com ↗
The company shared this week that it built a custom silicon chip — specifically a 5 nm ASIC chip, which is designed to handle the massive influx of raw data before it reaches the core "brain" of the self-driving system.
TechCrunch
Why this matters
- → Waymo's custom silicon cuts per-mile robotaxi costs — the race's new battlefield
- → 5nm ASIC outperforms Nvidia's automotive flagship while shrinking the power budget
- → Vertical integration signals the race has shifted from expansion to unit economics
Silicon as competitive moat