Alphabet (GOOGL.US) self-driving company Waymo's self-developed chip officially mass-produced with performance comparable to the latest NVDA.US (NVDA.US) system

Waymo, an autonomous driving company under Google's parent company Alphabet (GOOG.US, GOOGL.US), is further strengthening its control over core hardware technology.

The Zhitong Finance App learned that Waymo said on Thursday that the company has independently developed an ASIC chip dedicated to autonomous driving and has put into production the latest generation Robotaxi. This move is expected to improve the computational and responsiveness of autonomous vehicles, while reducing reliance on third-party chip vendors such as Nvidia (NVDA.US).

ASICs, or application-specific integrated circuits, are chips designed for specific applications. Waymo said that combining autonomous chips with hardware such as sensors developed by the company itself can improve Robotaxi's response speed and navigation ability in complex urban road environments.

In the past, Waymo mainly used chips from companies such as Nvidia and AMD (AMD.US) and integrated them into self-designed computing systems. As special chips are put into use, Waymo can process large amounts of data collected by vehicle sensors more quickly and run artificial intelligence models to recognize and understand the surrounding environment, thereby helping Robotaxi make driving decisions more quickly.

Waymo said that the new chip has more than 1000 TOPS of computing power, which means it can perform more than 1,000 trillion operations per second. Measured by this indicator, the performance of Waymo's self-developed chip is already comparable to Nvidia's latest generation autonomous driving system.

In terms of manufacturing, this chip is manufactured using the TSM.US (TSM.US) 5 nm process. Although 5 nm is no longer TSMC's most advanced manufacturing process, it is still widely used by many large technology companies in the production of high-performance chips.

This self-developed chip also means that Waymo is gradually shifting from mainly modifying existing cars for autonomous driving in the past to more in-depth integrated software and hardware design for Robotaxi needs. Waymo believes that this model can not only reduce vehicle costs, but also provide passengers with a more spacious and convenient riding space.

Currently, Waymo is a leading company in the US Robotaxi market, and is ahead of competitors such as Tesla (TSLA.US) and Zoox, a subsidiary of Amazon (AMZN.US), in terms of the scale of autonomous travel services provided in cities such as San Francisco, Phoenix, and Atlanta.

Waymo's previous fleet mainly used Jaguar cars and was equipped with autonomous driving technology and chips provided by third-party vendors. However, the company has recently launched a Robotaxi model developed in collaboration with Chinese automaker Geely Automobile's Jikrypton, and this model is currently equipped with Waymo's latest self-developed chip.

While Waymo is promoting its own chip development, its parent company Alphabet is also strengthening the layout of customized chips on a wider scale. As artificial intelligence infrastructure construction costs rise rapidly, Google is improving its ability to control core computing hardware and costs by expanding the scale of self-developed chips.

For Waymo, self-developed ASIC not only means a further improvement in the performance of autonomous driving systems, but also a more diversified supply of its chips. As competition in the Robotaxi market continues to heat up, deeper vertical integration of core technologies such as chips, sensors, and AI software is expected to be an important step for Waymo to expand the scale of autonomous driving services and control operating costs.