Waymo, Alphabet’s self-driving technology company, disclosed new details on August 20 about the onboard compute system used by the Waymo Driver.

The system includes a custom 5nm application-specific integrated circuit for processing lidar, radar, and camera data in real time.

Waymo said the system was designed for low latency, redundancy, and in-vehicle durability, and that Waymo Driver compute had scaled 20x in eight years.

The company said the design drew on more than 200 million miles of fully autonomous driving experience.

Waymo said the ASIC delivered more than 1,000 tera operations per second of machine-learning performance for front-end processing and ML models, and that its latest system processed data from 13 high-resolution cameras.

It named AMD, Micron, Nvidia, Samsung, SanDisk, Socionext, and TSMC as partners.

Waymo had surpassed 450,000 weekly paid rides by Dec. 8, 2025.

Waymo also introduced a 6th-generation Driver platform and later began fully autonomous operations with it by Feb. 12, 2026, though the company did not explicitly tie the 5nm chip disclosure to that platform.

🔗 Source: Waymo

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