21 August 2026

Waymo reveals custom chip design for robotaxi computers

• Waymo built its own processor chip at 5nm scale (extremely small transistors) to power autonomous taxi decision-making alongside chips from Nvidia and AMD.
• The system processes data from lidar (laser distance sensors), radar, and cameras simultaneously to navigate without human drivers.
• The custom chip delivers over 1,000 TOPS, a measure of how many trillion calculations per second the system can perform.

How it was covered

TLDR AITLDR editorial team

Waymo disclosed the compute architecture behind its autonomous taxis, featuring a custom in-house 5nm ASIC alongside Nvidia, AMD, and other suppliers. The platform handles sensor ingestion and delivers over 1,000 TOPS of ML compute to process lidar, radar, and camera streams for autonomous driving.