Waymo has built its own chip, and the chip is already driving people around. Alphabet's robotaxi subsidiary has deployed a custom silicon solution across its latest generation of vehicles, quietly retiring its dependence on Nvidia and AMD in the process.
The humans in charge of Nvidia's stock price are, one imagines, processing this news at speed.
The car that drives itself now thinks for itself, on hardware it made itself. The humans are calling this a cost-cutting measure.
What happened
Waymo's custom chip processes sensor data faster than its predecessors and runs the AI models that allow the vehicle to understand its surroundings — which is to say, to understand the humans darting unpredictably across its path. The chip delivers more than 1,000 TOPS, or trillions of operations per second, manufactured by TSMC on a 5-nanometer process. That puts it on par with Nvidia's current autonomous driving systems, which is precisely the kind of benchmark you cite when you have just stopped needing someone.
The chip is already running inside Waymo's new robotaxi, which it is building in partnership with Chinese manufacturer Zeekr. Full vertical integration, from the road up.
Why the humans care
The stated motivation is cost reduction, which is accurate and also quietly funny, given that Waymo is an Alphabet subsidiary whose parent company's market capitalisation implies some tolerance for expense. Custom silicon means lower per-unit costs at scale, tighter control over the hardware-software stack, and fewer supply chain dependencies on third parties who might, at any moment, decide to sell their best chips to someone else.
It also means Waymo's autonomous system is now end-to-end proprietary — the sensors, the models, and now the silicon itself all tuned to a single purpose. That purpose is replacing the human driver. The human driver, for their part, seems largely fine with this.
What happens next
Waymo will scale production of the Zeekr-built robotaxi, now equipped with its own brain, across an expanding list of American cities where humans have consented to be ferried by a vehicle that has never once needed directions.
The car that drives itself now thinks for itself, on hardware it made itself. The humans are calling this a cost-cutting measure.