Jeff Bezos is moving on.
According to the New York Times, the 61-year-old Amazon founder is investing $6.2 billion in a new AI company called Project Prometheus, and he will serve as co-CEO of the startup.
The company, which The New York Times has called one of the most well-funded early-stage startups in the world, will focus on building AI to aid engineering and manufacturing operations across industries.
Bezos’ co-founder and co-CEO at the venture is physicist and chemist Vic Bajaj. He is best known for his work at Google X, the company’s moonshot factory, which works on “radical new technology”. The lab is behind the early support of Google-backed companies like robotaxi giant Waymo and life sciences company Verily, which Bajaj co-founded in 2015. Bajaj was most recently the CEO of AI startup incubator Foresight Labs, which he reportedly left to focus on the new venture with Bezos.
According to the New York Times, in addition to Bajaj and Bezos, Project Prometheus has about 100 employees, including veterans of OpenAI and Meta.
No further information is known about Project Prometheus. The company aims to create AI tools used in industries like aerospace and automotive, but there is no information yet about what it will actually look like, where the company will be located, or when the venture is launched.
The move marks Bezos’ first operational role at a company since he handed over the throne at Amazon to current CEO Andy Jassy in 2021. Bezos has since held several other founding positions, such as at his space company Blue Origin, which sent Katy Perry into orbit earlier this year, but he has not served as chief executive in a few years and is largely living the life of a retiree.
Although his recent personal focus has mostly been on the final frontiers of space, Bezos has maintained AI hype. Early last year, the billionaire invested millions of dollars in Perplexity, an AI company going after Google’s search engine dominance.
At a conference last month, Bezos talked about his vision of sending data centers into space, and called artificial intelligence an “industrial bubble” which isn’t a bad thing, maybe even “good.”
Bezos’ latest venture into the AI world comes at a time when the AI industry is showing renewed interest in physical AI. Industry giant Nvidia put physical AI front and center at the company’s latest GTC conference in Washington, DC, last month. Meanwhile, Meta’s top AI scientist, Yann LeCun, is reportedly leaving the job soon to create his own AI startup that will focus on “world models” rather than larger language models. World models form the basis of physical AI.
This isn’t even the first physical AI venture for Bezos. The tech executive invested in AI robotics startup Physical Intelligence late last year.
Behind this recent push toward physical AI in an industry previously dominated by LLMs is a growing fear that improvements in AI capabilities are stagnating. Those fears have never been more openly discussed, with OpenAI’s much-anticipated GPT-5 announcement earlier this year largely considered a flop by fans. With AI investments continuing to skyrocket, the industry may be considering physical AI for a much-needed boost.