Jeff Bezos’ physical AI lab is close to raising $10 billion at a $38 billion valuation

Project Prometheus, launched in November 2025 with $6.2 billion in initial funding, is developing AI systems that understand the physical world, targeting engineering, manufacturing, aerospace, robotics, and drug discovery. The round has not yet closed.

Jeff Bezos is close to finalising a $10 billion funding round for his AI 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.

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.

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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.

Physical AI 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.

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.

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