Waymo puts a 1,000-TOPS ASIC in robotaxis

Waymo says its latest robotaxi compute system includes a purpose-built 5nm ASIC delivering more than 1,000 TOPS for front-end sensor processing and machine-learning inference, according to the company’s technical overview. The system processes data from 13 high-resolution cameras, runs redundantly, and has scaled total compute 20× in eight years; Waymo still lists AMD, Micron, Nvidia, Samsung, Sandisk, Socionext, and TSMC as partners. The operator lesson is narrower than “custom chips win”: physical AI teams can justify silicon when milliseconds, battery, and fault tolerance matter together, the same systems constraint behind the archive’s physical-AI funding analysis.