Waymo Unveils Custom AI Chip for Self-Driving Cars

Alphabet's Waymo has unveiled an in-house chip designed to process and combine raw information from its self-driving cars' cameras, radar, and lidar. The five-nanometer application-specific integrated circuit (5-nm ASIC) is built for real-time AI processing and improves visibility in low-light environments by cleaning up noisy camera data.

The new chip can deliver over 1,000 trillion operations per second of machine learning performance. Waymo's next-generation Ojai robotaxis have become available to the public in Los Angeles, Phoenix, and San Francisco, with further expansion expected in Denver, Las Vegas, and San Diego later this year.

Waymo continues to develop its own hardware while partnering with other companies like Nvidia, AMD, Micron, Samsung, and Marvell. The latter partnership was expanded on Wednesday to develop chips for Waymo's tensor processing unit (TPU) ecosystem.