Jeff Bezos' physical AI lab nears $10 billion raise at $38 billion valuation

At a glance:

• Bezos-backed Project Prometheus seeks $10 billion at $38 billion valuation
• Lab develops "physical AI" for engineering, manufacturing, aerospace, and drug discovery
• Led by former Google X scientist Vikram Bajaj with 120+ employees from OpenAI, xAI, Meta, and DeepMind

Bezos-backed lab targets physical industries with $10 billion round

Jeff Bezos is close to finalising a $10 billion funding round for his artificial intelligence laboratory at a $38 billion valuation, the Financial Times reported on Monday, citing people familiar with the deal. The startup, known internally as Project Prometheus, has attracted JPMorgan and BlackRock as investors in the new round. However, the fundraising had not yet been finalised at the time of publication. BlackRock declined to comment.

Focus on "physical AI" sets Prometheus apart from LLM wave

Project Prometheus launched in November 2025 with $6.2 billion in initial funding. It is focused on what the AI industry calls "physical AI", systems that learn through interaction with the real world and understand the laws of physics, rather than learning from text and images alone. This approach is conceptually distinct from the large language models that have dominated the AI investment cycle since 2022. LLMs are trained on publicly available text, images, and code, data that is abundant and relatively cheap.

Physical AI systems require specialised data on material behaviour, engineering tolerances, manufacturing processes, and real-world physics, much of which is proprietary and hard to collect at scale. That scarcity creates both a barrier to entry and a potential long-term advantage for companies that can accumulate it, which may partly explain why Prometheus attracted institutional investors of BlackRock and JPMorgan's scale even at an early stage.

Ambitious targets span engineering, aerospace, and drug discovery

The lab's stated targets include engineering, manufacturing, aerospace, robotics, drug discovery, and logistics automation. It is led by chief executive Vikram Bajaj, a former Google X scientist and co-founder of Foresite Labs, and has grown to over 120 employees drawn from leading AI companies including OpenAI, xAI, Meta, and DeepMind. Bezos is described as among the initial investors in the venture and has been leading the fundraising effort alongside Bajaj.

The $38 billion valuation, if confirmed, would make Prometheus one of the most richly valued early-stage AI startups in the world. For context, the deal would come just days after Amazon, the company Bezos founded, committed up to $25 billion in new investment to Anthropic and secured a $100 billion cloud spending pledge in return.

The parallel underscores how dramatically the scale of AI infrastructure deals has shifted: Prometheus, at $10 billion, is raising more in a single round than most AI companies have raised in their entire history.

Bezos returns to operational tech role with industrial AI vision

This venture marks the first time Bezos has held an operational role in a technology company since leaving Amazon in 2021. It also signals a broad ambition to apply AI directly to the physical industries—manufacturing, aerospace, construction, logistics—that LLMs have so far touched only superficially.

Whether Prometheus will achieve that ambition is an open question; the lab is still in its early phase and has not publicly demonstrated products or commercial deployments. The coming months will reveal whether its proprietary data strategy and institutional backing can translate into breakthroughs that reshape the physical economy.