TechCrunch Mobility: The custom chip driving Waymo’s robotaxi ambitions
- ID
- 17082
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 24 Aug 2026, 12:03 AM
- Fetched
- 24 Aug 2026, 12:23 AM
- Provider
- TechCrunch
- Category
- technology
- Original URL
- https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/23/techcrunch-mobility-the-custom-chip-driving-waymos-robotaxi-ambitions/
- Source URL
- https://techcrunch.com/feed/
Summary
- Score
- 4.0
- Created
- 24 Aug 2026, 12:23 AM
- Tags
- Audience
- developersai_ml_learners
What happened
Waymo revealed a custom 5nm ASIC chip for its sixth-generation self-driving system in the Ojai robotaxi, now open to all riders in Los Angeles, Phoenix, and San Francisco. The chip processes raw sensor data from 13 high-fidelity cameras and delivers over 1,000 TOPS, putting it in the same performance range as Nvidia's DRIVE AGX Thor automotive processor.
Why it matters
This is vendor-disclosed detail about Waymo's vertical integration into custom silicon, not an independent benchmark. For AI/ML builders, the useful signal is the 1,000 TOPS figure and the 13-camera data pipeline as a concrete reference point for autonomous driving compute requirements — but there is nothing here that requires changing your stack or approach unless you are building edge AV hardware.
Discussion angle
Compare Waymo's 1,000 TOPS custom ASIC against Nvidia DRIVE AGX Thor as a build-vs-buy decision: when does it make sense for a company to design its own inference chip versus using an off-the-shelf automotive SoC?