Waymo built a custom 5nm chip to process robotaxi sensor data

Waymo said on August 20, 2026 that it built a custom 5-nanometer chip delivering more than 1,000 trillion operations per second (TOPS) to process sensor data in its robotaxis. The application-specific integrated circuit, or ASIC, is part of a push to diversify its silicon supply beyond outside vendors such as Nvidia, and is already in production in the company’s latest vehicles.

The chip sits at the front of Waymo’s perception stack. It fuses and runs neural networks on raw camera, lidar and radar data in real time — including temporal denoising to sharpen low-light perception — before that data reaches the core models that plan the vehicle’s driving.

Building custom silicon is a bet on control. The Alphabet unit said the chip is already shipping in its newest robotaxi generation, including vehicles built with Zeekr, the electric-car brand of Geely Automobile Holdings.

Waymo is not cutting those vendors loose. The announcement, from vice president of engineering Satish Jeyachandran and compute lead Daniel Rosenband, named AMD, Micron, Nvidia, Samsung, Sandisk, Socionext and TSMC as manufacturing and component partners, a reminder that a “custom” chip still rides on a deep external supply chain.

What the disclosure does not include is independent performance data. The 1,000-plus TOPS figure and the low-light gains are Waymo’s own, without third-party benchmarks, and the company did not say how the chip compares with the merchant silicon it replaces. Whether in-house sensor processing translates into safer or cheaper rides is the test that matters as Waymo scales its fleet.