Waymo has built a custom robotaxi chip delivering over 1,000 TOPS, manufactured by TSMC on a 5-nanometer process, Bloomberg reports. The Alphabet subsidiary is ending its reliance on Nvidia and AMD silicon.
Key facts
- Chip delivers over 1,000 TOPS
- Manufactured by TSMC on 5-nanometer process
- Waymo previously relied on Nvidia and AMD
- Chip ships in new Zeekr-built robotaxi
- Alphabet subsidiary developed chip in-house
Waymo has developed a custom chip for its self-driving taxis that is already running in the company's latest generation of vehicles, Bloomberg reports. The Alphabet subsidiary says the chip processes sensor data faster and runs the AI models that help its robotaxis understand and react to their surroundings. Until now, the company relied on chips from Nvidia and AMD.
The chip delivers more than 1,000 TOPS (trillions of operations per second) and is manufactured by TSMC on a 5-nanometer process, according to the company. That puts it on par with Nvidia's current autonomous driving systems. The move is meant to bring costs down.
Why in-house silicon wins on economics
The shift is a direct attack on Nvidia's pricing power in the automotive segment. Waymo is installing the chip in its new robotaxi, which it's building with Chinese manufacturer Zeekr. Vertical integration lets Waymo control its bill of materials, a critical lever when scaling a fleet that must amortize hardware costs across thousands of vehicles. Nvidia has not commented on the design win loss, and the company did not disclose the per-unit cost of its custom silicon.
The broader de-Nvidia-ification trend
Waymo joins a growing list of hyperscalers and OEMs designing custom accelerators. Google, Waymo's parent, has long built its own TPUs for data center workloads. Tesla has shipped its own FSD computer for years. The pattern is consistent: at scale, the Nvidia tax becomes unacceptable. The difference here is the target is not training but the edge inference workload inside a moving vehicle, where power efficiency and latency matter as much as raw TOPS.
Waymo's 5nm process choice is notable for an edge chip — many automotive parts use older, cheaper nodes. The decision signals performance was prioritized over cost at design time, with the expectation that volume production on Zeekr's platform will drive unit economics down.
What remains unclear is whether the custom chip handles all inference tasks or is paired with a co-processor for redundancy. Waymo has not disclosed the full system architecture, nor has it said whether the chip will be offered to other autonomous vehicle developers. The company also did not disclose the chip's power draw or whether it supports over-the-air updates to its neural networks.
Key Takeaways
- Waymo built a custom 1,000-TOPS robotaxi chip on TSMC 5nm, cutting Nvidia and AMD reliance.
- The move targets cost reduction as Zeekr-based fleet scales.
What to watch
Watch for Waymo's fleet expansion numbers on the Zeekr platform and any disclosure of per-mile hardware costs in its next investor update. Also track whether Nvidia announces a pricing response for its automotive DRIVE platform, and whether other robotaxi operators — Cruise, Zoox, or Baidu — follow with their own custom silicon.
Source: the-decoder.com
