Overview
- Waymo disclosed on Thursday that it has built a purpose‑made 5nm ASIC, fabricated by TSMC, that is already in production inside its sixth‑generation Ojai robotaxis and in service for riders in Los Angeles, Phoenix and San Francisco with roughly 300 Ojais in the fleet.
- Waymo says the chip delivers more than 1,000 TOPS dedicated to front‑end sensor processing and runs temporal denoising and sensor‑fusion models on inputs from cameras, lidar and radar before passing processed data to the main driving stack.
- The new silicon is part of an ML‑primary, redundant architecture that runs two independent compute engines in parallel and is paired with off‑the‑shelf CPUs, GPUs and other accelerators from partners including Nvidia, AMD, Micron and Samsung.
- Ojai base vehicles are made by Geely’s Zeekr in Ningbo, China and are fitted with Waymo’s Driver system in Mesa, Arizona, a supply chain that lowers design costs but adds tariff and unit‑cost pressure as the company scales.
- The move joins Alphabet’s wider push into in‑house AI chips and sharpens industry questions about tradeoffs between multi‑sensor fusion and camera‑only approaches while leaving key commercial questions about per‑vehicle cost and supply‑chain risk unanswered.