Waymo Unveils Custom AI Chip for Autonomous Vehicles

Waymo, an autonomous vehicle company backed by Alphabet, has designed its own custom AI chip to process sensor data in real-time. The chip is manufactured using TSMC's 5-nanometer process technology and can run both convolutional neural networks and transformer models.

The chip's design reflects lessons learned from over 200 million miles of accumulated autonomous driving data, giving it a real-world grounding that off-the-shelf chips lack. Waymo says the ASIC delivers over 1,000 TOPS of AI performance, though the company hasn't disclosed the precision level or power consumption behind that figure.

Waymo's custom chip exists to turn raw camera, radar, and lidar data into driving decisions in a matter of milliseconds. The company addresses latency concerns by running duplicate systems for redundancy and cooling its chips with liquid coolant tapped from the vehicle's engine.