Waymo names the silicon behind its robotaxis — a purpose-built 5nm chip above 1,000 TOPS

On 21 August 2026 Waymo disclosed new technical detail about the computer that runs its autonomous driving stack, including a purpose-built 5-nanometre application-specific chip delivering more than 1,000 trillion operations per second of machine-learning throughput, in a compute platform built with Nvidia.

What it means Driving at fleet scale turns out to be an inference-hardware problem as much as a model problem, and this is a rare public number for it.