Amazon’s Jeff Bezos has been building again since leaving the e-commerce giant in 2021, and his latest venture, a physical AI lab, is already approaching a $38 billion valuation.
Bezos’ new company, codenamed Project Prometheus, is close to completing a $10 billion fundraising deal from JP Morgan, BlackRock and other investors, Financial Times reports. I mentioned Tuesday, citing people familiar with the matter.
Prometheus launched in November 2025, raising $6.2 billion in seed capital from investors, including Bezos himself. Reports indicate 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 valuation of $38 billion.
Why all this interest in Bezos’ artificial intelligence lab?
Project Prometheus is described as a physical AI laboratory that brings tech billionaire Jeff Bezos back into an operational role, since he left Amazon in 2021.
The company aims to build new artificial intelligence systems that understand the physical laws of the universe and can interact with the physical environment, especially in manufacturing and industrial processes. These systems are very different from the AI models provided by OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and other popular LLM companies.
The main challenge facing companies building physical AI systems is usually the data moat. Large language models are trained on text, code, images, and data from the Internet, which is readily and abundantly available.
Physical AI requires real-world interactive data, such as sensor readings, manufacturing processes, haptic feedback, trajectories, failures in chaotic environments, etc., which is typically proprietary and expensive to collect.
Elon Musk’s Tesla is a good example of the state of data in the physical AI space. Tesla reportedly has between 5 and 6 million electric cars equipped with fully autonomous (supervised) hardware and software, driving more than 50 billion miles each year. The real-world driving data collected gives the company an advantage over competitors in improving the autonomous driving experience.
And that is the leverage that Prometheus will pursue with its newly raised capital, with the aim of becoming “one of the most important companies in the world,” says Arch Nielsen, director of Prometheus. But the AI company wants to do this through a holding company.
Prometheus will shop companies for data
Bezos and Prometheus co-CEO Vikram Bajaj, a former Google executive, are 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 engineering, architecture and design firms, which two executives believe will be disrupted by Prometheus. The holding company will serve as a “manufacturing transformation vehicle.” People said.
Through investments in such companies, the company can collect real-world data to train Prometheus AI systems. The AI Lab is still mostly in its early stage. It has hired more than 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 an option to commit up to an additional $20 billion over time. Anthropic is Committed to spending more than $100 billion on AWS technologies over the next decade, as part of the new deal, Cryptopolitan reported on Tuesday.
