Bolt Graphics Switches On First Zeus Test Chip, But Shipping Is Years Away

Bolt Graphics has brought up the first working piece of silicon tied to its Zeus GPU effort, according to Engadget. The California company confirmed in mid-October that a 12nm test chip, manufactured by TSMC, booted up with no problems.

The milestone does not mean the card is close to store shelves. Bolt does not expect its planned Zeus product to reach volume production until 2028, so the test part is an early step rather than a near-term launch.

Bolt also announced a Taipei office, a move meant to keep the company near the partners that will build its hardware. Two days after the test chip news, Reuters reported that Bolt was seeking roughly $100 million in funding at a valuation near $700 million, attributing the figure to three unnamed sources.

The test chip itself is small. It occupies 6mm^2 and consumes 1.4 watts, a sharp drop from the 35 watts drawn by the FPGA that Bolt used earlier to prototype its design. Its central feature is purpose-built circuitry for electromagnetic simulation, a task that supports the design of products such as radar sensors and camera lenses.

Darwesh Singh, Bolt's founder and chief executive, told HPCwire that the part demonstrates the company can execute a demanding physics algorithm with hardware acceleration, something he said has not been achieved before. Bolt has not released performance numbers for the test chip and says only that results came in above its own projections.

The Zeus GPU that Bolt intends to sell is a different chip entirely, built on TSMC's N5P node. Bolt chose that 2020-era process to steer clear of fighting other chipmakers for scarce wafer capacity.

Zeus pairs RISC-V cores, which rely on an open instruction set, with Bolt's in-house path-tracing hardware. Its PCIe cards mix soldered LPDDR5X memory with laptop-style DDR5 SO-DIMM slots, allowing memory to grow to 384GB.

At its March 2025 announcement, Bolt made large claims: ten times the rendering speed of current GPUs, 300 times faster electromagnetic simulation, and up to ten times the path tracing throughput of Nvidia's RTX 5090. None of those figures has been independently verified.

Bolt plans to sell Zeus to studios, engineers and scientists first, with gaming and AI to follow. In April the company said over 14,000 businesses, developers and individuals had joined its early access program, and that its product pipeline exceeded $500 million, without naming customers. It also claimed Zeus could lower compute costs by as much as 17 times.