Photo by Daniel Oberhaus, 2019 via Flickr. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos is back to building again since leaving the e-commerce giant in 2021, and his latest venture, a physical AI lab, is already close to a $38 billion valuation.
Bezos’ new company, codenamed Project Prometheus, is close to finalizing a $10 billion fundraising deal from JPMorgan, BlackRock, and other investors, The Financial Times reported Tuesday, citing people with knowledge of the matter.
Prometheus launched in November 2025, raising a $6.2 billion in seed capital from investors, including Bezos himself. Reports note that demand from institutional investors was so high that they had to extend the round to include an additional $10 billion.
The new funding round, which is expected to close soon, puts the company at a $38bn valuation.
Why so much interest in Bezos’ AI lab?
Project Prometheus is touted as a physical AI laboratory that has the tech billionaire Jeff Bezos back to serving an operational role again, since leaving Amazon in 2021.
The company aims to build novel AI systems that understand the physical laws of the universe and can interact with the physical environment, especially in manufacturing and industrial processes. Such systems are quite different from the AI models by OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and other popular LLM companies.
The major challenge for companies building physical AI systems is usually the data moat. Large-language models are trained on texts, code, images, and data scraped from the internet, which are readily available and in abundance.
Physical AI requires real-world interaction data, like sensor readings, manufacturing processes, tactile feedback, trajectories, failures in messy environments, etc., which are usually proprietary and expensive to collect.
Elon Musk’s Tesla is a good textbook case of the data situation in physical AI space. Tesla reportedly has 5-6 million electric cars fitted with Full Self-Driving (Supervised) hardware and software, driving more than 50 billion miles every year. The real-world driving data collected gives the company an edge over competitors in improving the self-driving experience.
That’s a leverage Prometheus is going to pursue with the freshly raised capital, with the goal of becoming “one of the most important companies in the world,” says Arch’s Nelsen, a Prometheus director. But the AI company wants to do this through a holding company.
Prometheus will shop companies for data
Bezos and Prometheus co-chief executive Vikram Bajaj, a former Google executive, are also leading separate talks to raise tens of billions of dollars for the holding company, according to people familiar with the matter.
All those billions will mostly go toward acquiring companies, especially in the areas of engineering, architecture, and design companies, which two execs believe would be disrupted by Prometheus. The holding company would serve more like a “manufacturing transformation vehicle,” the people said.
With investments in such businesses, the company can collect real-world data to train Prometheus AI systems. The AI lab is mostly still in its early phase. It has recruited over 100 employees, including talent from big names like Meta, OpenAI, and DeepMind.
In other news, Amazon has also invested an additional $5 billion in Anthropic, with the option to commit up to $20 billion more over time. Anthropic is committed to spending over $100 billion on AWS technologies over the next decade, as part of the new deal, Cryptopolitan reported Tuesday.
