Waymo — “A look under our trunk: what’s in our compute”

Waymo, the self-driving car company, shared new details about the computer hardware that runs its vehicles. The system has to process camera, radar, and lidar (laser-based distance sensing) data in real time, make driving decisions in milliseconds, and keep working without a human backup. Waymo says it has scaled up the raw processing power of this system 20 times over the past eight years, drawing on more than 200 million miles of fully autonomous driving.

The centerpiece is a custom chip Waymo built specifically for this job, which the company says delivers over 1,000 TOPS (a measure of computing speed) dedicated to reading raw sensor data and feeding it to the car's decision-making software. The hardware is also built to handle vibration, shock, and temperature swings, from cold Midwest winters to Phoenix heat, and has a backup system: two computing units that normally split the work but can each take over the whole job if the other fails. Waymo partners with chipmakers including AMD, Nvidia, Samsung, and TSMC to build these systems.

This is a look at the technology behind Waymo's robotaxi service, not a product or upgrade for personal vehicles. It doesn't touch home energy use, heating and cooling systems, or rebate programs, and has no direct bearing on decisions about upgrading your own house.