The company said its ‘purpose-built 5nm ASIC’ chip aims to optimise AV systems for ‘low-latency performance’.

Waymo, the Alphabet-owned autonomous vehicle (AV) manufacturer, has built a custom AI chip to improve the future performance of its robotaxis.

In a blogpost yesterday (20 August) written jointly by the company’s vice-president of engineering and its compute lead, the company said its “purpose-built 5nm ASIC” chip aims to optimise AV systems for “low-latency performance”, leading to better and faster execution of real-time driving commands.

Waymo said its AV systems integrate co-designed hardware, sensors and algorithms to “process, fuse and run advanced neural networks on raw sensor data in real time”, and that its custom chip is built to “handle the massive influx of raw data” that an AV system must process.

Because Waymo’s system “handles the entire task of driving without a human backup”, the blogpost read, the company’s AV compute is built around three “non-negotiable” pillars, one of which is responsiveness – so the system is capable of “constantly processing decisions within milliseconds” to make safe decisions with “ultra-low latency”.

The ASIC chip can deliver more than 1,000 TOPS – trillions of operations per second – of machine-learning (ML) performance “dedicated to front-end processing and ML models”, according to Waymo.

The company said that aside from developing its custom silicon, it is also partnering with companies such as AMD, Micron, Nvidia, Samsung, Sandisk, Socionext and TSMC to scale Waymo’s technologies.

The company currently serves riders in 11 US cities, according to its website, and it has plans to expand to nearly 20 more, as well as London and Tokyo.

In June, a recall notice showed that Waymo was pulling nearly 3,900 robotaxis from US streets over a software issue that let AVs enter and drive in closed freeway construction zones.

In May, the company had to recall nearly 3,800 robotaxis from US cities over a software issue that could allow vehicles to drive onto flooded roadways.

Waymo raised $16bn in a February funding round led by Dragoneer Investment Group, DST Global and Sequoia Capital – with more investment from parent company Alphabet and several others – that put the AV company’s valuation at $126bn.

Earlier this week, a three-way collaboration between Uber, Pony AI and Verne began offering robotaxi services to Uber customers in Zagreb, Croatia.

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