Bolt Graphics Powers On First Zeus GPU Test Chip

Bolt Graphics has powered on the first silicon for its Zeus GPU project, but the finished card is not expected to reach volume production until 2028. The California startup said its 12nm test chip, manufactured by TSMC, ran without issues when switched on in mid-October. Bolt also said it opened a Taipei office to stay close to manufacturing partners ahead of production.

Test chip details

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 products such as radar sensors and camera lenses. Chief executive and founder Darwesh Singh told HPCwire the chip shows Bolt can run "a highly complex physics algorithm, accelerated in hardware, which no one's done before." Bolt has not published performance figures for the test chip and said only that it beat the company's internal estimates.

What Zeus is

The Zeus GPU is a completely separate chip that will be made on TSMC's N5P process node. Bolt says it chose the 2020-era N5P process to avoid competing with other chipmakers for already limited wafer supplies. Zeus 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 DDR5 SO-DIMM slots, letting owners expand the cards up to 384GB of memory.

Claims and markets

When Bolt announced Zeus in March 2025, it claimed 10 times the rendering performance of existing GPUs, 300 times the speed in electromagnetic simulation, and up to 10 times the path tracing throughput of Nvidia's RTX 5090. As is usually the case in situations like this, those claims have not been independently tested. Bolt is selling Zeus first to studios, engineers and scientists, with plans to expand into gaming and AI later, which would place it in the consumer GPU market against Nvidia and AMD. Reuters pointed out that a gaming chip needs deep software support to run the thousands of games already on sale.

Funding and demand

Two days after Bolt's mid-October update, Reuters reported that the company was trying to raise about $100 million at a valuation of around $700 million, citing three people familiar with the matter. Bolt said in April that more than 14,000 businesses, developers 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 name any customers. In the same announcement, Bolt also claimed Zeus would cut compute costs by up to 17 times compared with current hardware.

Sources: Engadget