Waymo Custom 5nm Chip Anchors Robotaxi Push Into 15 US Cities

Silicon under the trunk floor

Waymo has built a lot of its own hardware over the years, but its newest piece is a chip. The Alphabet-owned company has introduced a purpose-built 5-nanometer ASIC that turns raw lidar, radar and camera data into usable signals before that data reaches the vehicle's main machine-learning computer. Waymo rates it at more than 1,000 trillion operations per second.11 In a company blog post, engineering vice president Satish Jeyachandran and compute lead Daniel Rosenband called the processor a specialized machine-learning engine whose only job is to process, fuse and run neural networks on sensor data in real time.13

The chip anchors a computing system designed around what Waymo calls three non-negotiable requirements. The system has to be responsive, making decisions within milliseconds with no help from offboard servers. It has to be rugged enough to handle vibration, shock and temperature extremes. And it has to be redundant: two compute units normally share the workload, and one takes over if the other fails.13 Waymo says its in-house silicon has gained about 20 times more compute in eight years. The hardware is cooled by the car's liquid-cooling loop and fits under the rear load floor, so passengers keep their cargo space.13 The company also pointed to a practical benefit: the chip cuts temporal noise in low-light images, which improves how well the car sees objects at night.13

Waymo is not dropping the big chipmakers. It still names AMD, Micron, NVIDIA, Samsung, Sandisk, Socionext and TSMC as partners in its computing stack.1113 The approach is clear. Waymo designs its own silicon for the narrow, latency-critical step of turning sensor data into perception, and buys commodity CPUs, GPUs and accelerators for routine work such as orchestration, data movement and logging.13

Accounts differ on the details

Coverage of the disclosure mostly agrees on the main specs but splits on timing and framing. One outlet dated Waymo's first detailed look at its compute architecture to August 20 and called it an unusual opening-up by a famously secretive company. That piece also said the disclosure left out specific chip vendors,15 which is hard to square with other reports that list seven named suppliers.1113 The same piece described Waymo as running about 150,000 paid rides a week in four cities.15 That figure is well behind other reporting, which puts weekly paid rides above 500,000.24 Even reports on the overall footprint disagree. One article on the chip said Waymo was active in 11 US cities,11 while a regularly updated tracker counts 15 metros open to the public.4 The best reading is that the hardware story has been retold in pieces while the business kept growing, and the newer, more detailed numbers should carry the most weight.

Why a chip matters for the economics

The main reason for the chip is cost and capability per vehicle, not prestige. The new Ojai robotaxi uses 13 cameras, four lidars and six radars, compared with 29 cameras, five lidars and six radars on the previous system. That is about 42% fewer sensors, and Waymo says the car sees farther and handles harsh weather better.14 A custom processor that pulls more out of each sensor is part of what makes the smaller sensor suite workable.14

Waymo has not published per-unit costs. One market analysis cites industry estimates that put the new self-driving hardware under $20,000 and the base Ojai vehicle around $38,000 before tariffs. The same analysis warns that widely shared claims of a drop from $100,000 to $20,000 compare a whole older Jaguar robotaxi with only the hardware in the new one.14 That caution is fair. Still, the direction is clear, and at fleet scale even moderate per-vehicle savings add up quickly.

The chip goes into the Ojai, which began carrying riders in Phoenix, Los Angeles and San Francisco this summer.1118 Denver and San Diego started with Ojai-only fleets, and Las Vegas opened in September with a majority-Ojai fleet.417 On October 6, Waymo announced a silver version of the Ojai with a revised interior, including a wireless phone charger and rear armrests. It is ramping up at the company's driver-integration plant in Mesa, Arizona, and is due to start giving rides in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Las Vegas in the coming weeks.59

Expansion, now partly funded with debt

The hardware news comes as Waymo is expanding faster than at any point in its history. Denver, San Diego and Tampa opened to paid, fully driverless service on September 1. Las Vegas followed on September 14, making it Waymo's 15th metro and its first in Nevada, with a waitlist of more than 100,000 people.417 Waymo's published list of upcoming markets includes Boston, Chicago, New York, Washington DC and others, along with London and Tokyo. Those are stated plans, not launch dates.4 Waymo is targeting Tokyo for public riders in 2027 and Singapore in 2028.4

Paying for this has changed. On October 8, Waymo closed a $5 billion term loan, its first debt financing. PIMCO, Blackstone and Sixth Street led the deal, and Goldman Sachs was sole lead bookrunner.110 Bloomberg-sourced reporting says the deal grew from an initial target of more than $3 billion and priced at 5.25 percentage points over the benchmark rate. The same reporting says Waymo is dealing with rising AI costs.712 The loan follows a $16 billion equity round at a $126 billion valuation earlier this year.12 CFO Steve Fieler described the debt as a step in Waymo's move into a scaling commercial business.38

The custom chip and the loan are best understood together. Lenders will want unit economics that improve, and owning the silicon that sets perception performance and hardware cost is one of the few levers Waymo fully controls. Ground operations matter too. Lyft's Flexdrive unit opened an 80,000-square-foot depot in Nashville built to charge, clean and maintain Waymo vehicles.2 Fleet utilization, not just autonomy, will decide whether the business pays for itself.

The supply chain question behind the Ojai

One part of the story is still unsettled. A reference entry describes the Ojai as built by Zeekr in Ningbo, China, then finished in Mesa, Arizona. It adds that Waymo dropped the Zeekr name because American consumers did not know it.18 Separate analysis notes that Waymo's own materials have stopped mentioning Zeekr. That analysis declines to call the Ojai a rebadged Zeekr RT because Waymo has not confirmed it.16 It also points to a Commerce Department connected-vehicle rule. That rule bars Chinese-controlled manufacturers from offering robotaxi services in the US, and it bans covered Chinese-origin software in completed vehicles starting with model year 2027.16 The rule's definition of a manufacturer includes companies that integrate driving software onto vehicles, which describes what Waymo does.16 Hyundai's Georgia-built IONIQ 5 robotaxis, with first deliveries expected in the fourth quarter, look like a hedge against that deadline.16 Waymo's in-house compute helps on the software side, but where its vehicle bodies are built is still a regulatory risk.

Regulators are still writing the rules

Federal oversight is moving, but it trails what is on the road. NHTSA granted Zoox the first commercial exemption for a purpose-built robotaxi on July 30, capped at 2,500 vehicles a year for two years.2127 The agency is also auditing Tesla's self-certified Cybercab and on September 10 issued a Special Order requiring sworn answers about how the vehicle was certified.2122 Waymo's vehicles keep conventional controls, so they comply with existing safety standards and face no exemption cap. One analysis calls this the "boring choice" that leaves its growth unconstrained.

That does not leave Waymo outside federal scrutiny. In July, NHTSA Administrator Jonathan Morrison told AV developers to submit plans for fixing robotaxi interference at emergency scenes. Observers widely read the directive as aimed at Waymo, following incidents that included stranded Waymo vehicles in San Francisco. No submissions or outcomes have been made public.21 NHTSA has also formed a $5 million, three-year consortium with SAE International to develop the first federal performance standard for automated driving. Outside analysts do not expect an enforceable rule before 2030.25

Safety data is split as well. Waymo reports 270 million fully autonomous miles and estimates that 841 injuries were avoided.8 The Los Angeles Times reports that Waymo-involved collisions in California nearly doubled in 2025, to more than 590, as the fleet grew.19 Both can be true. Without a regulator-defined way to compare crash rates per mile, Waymo's growth is outpacing anyone's ability to measure it independently.

The chip by itself will not decide whether Waymo reaches its goal of 1 million weekly rides.4 It does show where the company thinks its advantage lies: it owns the parts of the self-driving stack that matter most, and it is now borrowing to roll that stack out to more cities.