Apparatus and method for compression of acceleration structure build data in a ray tracing implementation. For example, one embodiment of an apparatus comprises: traversal hardware logic to traverse rays through a graphics scene comprising a plurality of primitives; and an acceleration data structure processing unit comprising: a bounding box compressor to compress a set of bounding boxes to generate a plurality of bounding box compression blocks, and an index compressor to compress a set of indices to generate a plurality of index compression blocks, and an acceleration data structure builder for constructing acceleration structures based on bounding box compression blocks and index compression blocks.