FuriaHubWaymo shows the 5nm ASIC under its robotaxi trunk
Waymo published its first public look at in-vehicle compute, including a purpose-built 5nm ASIC for front-end sensor processing. The company says those ASICs alone deliver more than 1,000 TOPS.
On August 20, 2026, Waymo offered the first public look at the compute in the trunk of its Driver. The post describes a purpose-built 5nm ASIC that processes, fuses, and runs neural nets on raw lidar, radar, and camera streams before they reach the core ML stack.
What we know
- Waymo says the ASICs alone deliver more than 1,000 TOPS for front-end processing and ML models.
- Onboard compute has scaled 20 times in eight years, and the stack is built as two independent engines that can take over if one faults.
- The company lists partners including AMD, Micron, NVIDIA, Samsung, Sandisk, Socionext, and TSMC.
- Hardware is liquid-cooled with the vehicle and is meant to run silently without giving up trunk space.
Takeaways
- The 5nm chip is for sensor front-end work, not the whole Driver.
- Redundancy is two engines, because there is no human backup.
- Waymo is pairing custom silicon with a long list of chip vendors.
Source: Waymo
