Waymo Develops Its Own Robotaxi Chip, Cutting Reliance on NVIDIA

The Robotaxi's Brain, Now Built In-House

Waymo, Alphabet's self-driving subsidiary, has designed its own chip for its robotaxis. According to a Bloomberg report, the chip is already running in Waymo's latest-generation vehicles. NVIDIA and AMD chips have handled the core computing work in robotaxis up to now, so this announcement marks Waymo's first step toward reducing that dependence.

Why Waymo Needed Its Own Chip

Robotaxis have to process a constant stream of sensor data from cameras, lidar, and radar in real time, then run that data through trained AI models to understand their surroundings and decide what to do next. Both tasks demand enormous computing power, and until now that work has run on hardware from general-purpose chipmakers. Waymo says its new chip both speeds up sensor data processing and runs the self-driving AI models directly. The company cited cost savings as the reason for moving to its own design.

Performance and Manufacturing

According to figures Waymo has disclosed, the chip delivers more than 1,000 TOPS of processing power and is manufactured by Taiwan's TSMC on a 5-nanometer process. By the company's own account, that puts it on par with NVIDIA's current self-driving systems.

Category	Before	Now
Chip supply	NVIDIA, AMD	Waymo's own design, alongside NVIDIA and AMD
Manufacturing	-	TSMC 5nm process
Processing performance	-	1,000+ TOPS
Vehicles used in	Previous-generation robotaxis	New robotaxi model built with Zeekr

The new chip will go into the next-generation robotaxi that Waymo is building with Chinese automaker Zeekr — pairing custom vehicle hardware with custom silicon in a single supply line.

AI Companies Are Building Their Own Chips Too

Waymo isn't alone in this shift. As METAL LAB reported on August 8, Anthropic also confirmed it has formed its own silicon team to design chips specifically for Claude models. Anthropic, however, said it will keep a multi-chip strategy, using its own chips alongside hardware from other vendors rather than replacing them outright. Big AI service companies moving into chip design isn't new — Google has its TPU, Amazon has Trainium — and Waymo's move fits into that same pattern.

NVIDIA, for its part, isn't entering this race as a competitor; it's the company selling the chips that power AI to everyone else. Watching major customers, whether in self-driving or chatbots, gradually shift to their own custom chips isn't exactly welcome news for NVIDIA.

Editor's Take

Waymo's move is best understood as a cost decision. Sensor and compute costs per robotaxi have long been a make-or-break factor in the business's overall profitability, so swapping general-purpose chips for hardware built to its exact needs could meaningfully cut costs. The specs — TSMC's 5nm process and 1,000 TOPS of performance — don't look like an attempt to simply match NVIDIA's lineup; it makes more sense to read them as the result of stripping out unnecessary features to fit the narrow use case of self-driving.

For anyone who's watched this play out before, the pattern will feel familiar. Google built TPUs optimized for search and advertising; Amazon built Trainium optimized for its own cloud; now Waymo has built a chip optimized for the single purpose of running robotaxis. The math keeps repeating itself: once a company's usage scales past a certain point, designing your own chip ends up cheaper than paying the markup on general-purpose silicon.

For domestic self-driving and robotics companies, this news cuts two ways. Very few firms have the resources to follow Waymo or Anthropic into custom chip design — most will still depend on general-purpose chips from NVIDIA or AMD. But as major customers peel away, competition for the remaining customers on price and performance could actually intensify, which means now might be a good time to revisit existing contract terms.

More announcements like this from other robotaxi and self-driving companies are likely in the coming months. How NVIDIA's self-driving revenue segment performs in its upcoming earnings reports will be an early signal of how fast this shift is moving.