Bolt Graphics powers on its first Zeus GPU

The test chip ran fine but Bolt's Zeus GPU is still a long way from shipping.

Bolt Graphics

Bolt Graphics has powered on the first silicon for its Zeus GPU project, though the card it's building toward isn't expected to reach volume production until 2028. The California-based startup said in mid-October that its 12nm test chip, made by chipmaking giant TSMC, ran without issues when switched on. Bolt also said it had opened an office in Taipei to stay close to its manufacturing partners ahead of production. Two days later, Reuters reported that Bolt was trying to raise about $100 million at a valuation of around $700 million, citing three people familiar with the matter.

The test chip measures 6mm^2 and draws 1.4 watts, compared with the 35 watts used by the FPGA (a reprogrammable chip used for prototyping) that Bolt previously ran its design on. Its main feature is dedicated hardware for electromagnetic simulation, which helps design everything from radar sensors to camera lenses.

Bolt's CEO and founder Darwesh Singh told HPCwire that the chip shows Bolt can run "a highly complex physics algorithm, accelerated in hardware, which no one's done before." However, Bolt hasn't published any performance figures for the test chip, saying only that it beat the company's internal estimates. The Zeus GPU Bolt plans to debut is a completely separate chip that'll be made on TSMC's N5P process node. Bolt says it picked the 2020-era N5P process to avoid competing with other chipmakers for already limited wafer supplies.

What is Zeus, exactly?

Bolt's Zeus GPU is built around RISC-V processor cores, which use an open-standard instruction set, paired with Bolt's own path-tracing hardware. Its PCIe cards will combine soldered LPDDR5X memory with the DDR5 SO-DIMM slots you'll usually find in a laptop, letting owners expand the cards up to 384GB of memory. When Bolt announced Zeus in March 2025, it made lofty claims of 10 times the rendering performance of existing GPUs and 300 times the speed in electromagnetic simulation, saying Zeus could deliver up to 10 times the path tracing throughput (i.e., how many light rays a rendering system can process per second) of Nvidia's RTX 5090.

As is usually the case in situations like this, these claims have not been independently tested. Bolt is selling Zeus to studios, engineers and scientists first, with plans to expand into gaming and AI later. That'd put Zeus in the consumer GPU market against Nvidia and AMD. That will be an interesting move, given, as Reuters pointed out, the deep software support a gaming chip needs to run the thousands of games already on sale.

Bolt said back in April that more than 14,000 businesses, devs and individual users had signed up for its early access program, and that it had a product pipeline worth more than $500 million. It did not, however, name any customers. In the same announcement, Bolt also claimed that Zeus would cut compute costs by up to 17 times compared with current hardware.