Waymo, the Autonomous Driving institutional sector of Google parent Alphabet, has developed a custom chip dedicated to robotaxis (Robotaxi, Autonomous Driving taxis). The move is seen as an effort to reduce reliance on external chips from companies such as Nvidia and AMD.
Waymo has begun mass-producing its custom application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) for its robotaxis and is installing it in the latest-generation robotaxis, Bloomberg reported on the 20th local time. Waymo said, "By using self-developed sensors and custom chips together with other components, we can improve robotaxi reaction speed and driving capabilities in complex urban environments."
Waymo is the leading company in the U.S. robotaxi market. Until now, Waymo had used products from Nvidia and AMD. The company said that with the dedicated chip, it can process sensor data faster and run artificial intelligence (AI) models that help robotaxis perceive and respond to their surroundings.
Most of Waymo's vehicles had been modified Jaguar cars equipped with Autonomous Driving technology and chips from external vendors. Recently, it launched a robotaxi co-developed with Zeekr, a brand under China's Geely Automobile Holdings, and installed its in-house chip in the vehicle.
Waymo's in-house chip can handle more than 1,000 trillion operations per second. That is on par with Nvidia's latest Autonomous Driving system. The chip is manufactured using Taiwan's TSMC 5-nanometer (nm) process.