TechCrunch Mobility: The custom chip driving Waymo’s robotaxi ambitions

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Waymo gets a lot of attention for its fast-paced expansion. And for good reason; it seems like every week, the company’s robotaxis are arriving in a new city, or expanding within an existing service area.

We’ve known for a while that Waymo’s sixth-generation self-driving system — which debuted in its next-generation Ojai robotaxi — is central to those ambitions. But now we have a better understanding about why.

The company, which just opened its Ojai robotaxi to all riders in Los Angeles, Phoenix, and San Francisco, has repeatedly said that this next-gen vehicle is cheaper to build, operate, and maintain — ingredients required if the company has any hopes of someday turning a profit.

What was less clear, until this week, was just how hands-on and vertically integrated Waymo has become as it chases that goal.

The company shared this week that it built a custom silicon chip — specifically a 5 nm ASIC chip, which is designed to handle the massive influx of raw data before it reaches the core “brain” of the self-driving system. (To get a sense of how much data, consider that the Waymo Ojai has 13 high-fidelity cameras.) Waymo said the chip delivers more than 1,000 TOPS (trillions of operations per second) of computing performance, a statistic that puts it roughly in the same performance range as Nvidia’s latest DRIVE AGX Thor automotive processor, a powerful computer designed for automated driving applications.

The end result, Waymo says, is a system that has “unmatched efficiency and performance.” The upshot: Waymo contends that this chip is a critical piece of a system that can react fast and safely in complex, high-density environments — like cities.

It’s worth noting that Waymo isn’t working alone on compute. The company listed a slew of partners, some for the first time, that includes AMD, Micron, Nvidia, Samsung, Sandisk, Socionext, and TSMC.

A couple of little birds spoke to Sean O’Kane (senior reporter, special projects at TechCrunch) about a rather curious investigation being conducted by the Idaho National Laboratory .

According to our sources, the lab is evaluating whether Chinese lidar sensors might pose a security risk if they become widely used on vehicles in the United States. That is notable on its own. But what got our attention is that the research is being funded by a company — or a group of companies — in the electric and autonomous vehicle industries.

O’Kane reached out to numerous companies, including Rivian, General Motors, Ford, Kodiak, Lucid Motors, Nuro, and Uber. And all of these companies said they were unaware of the review.