Getting Physical: Jeff Bezos’s Billion-Dollar Quest to Fire Up Manufacturing with AI

He’s not giving fire to mankind, but Jeff Bezos thinks “physical AI” could be equally transformative for industrial firms.

It’s a premise juicy enough that the Amazon founder’s latest endeavor, the aptly code-named Project Prometheus, is close to scoring a new $10 billion fundraise at a cool $38 billion valuation, according to the Financial Times. We’re just assuming for everyone’s sake that Bezos has a plan for sidestepping the “eternal torment” portion of the Greek myth he’s riffing on.

Bezos-shire Hathaway

Simply put, Prometheus seeks to do to manufacturing, design and engineering what coding agents have done to the software world. Bezos, in his first operational role since relinquishing his Amazon CEO title in 2021, is serving as co-CEO with Google veteran Vik Bajaj. The pair raised an initial $6.2 billion in November, and sources told the FT that the company has already hired hundreds of staffers to build AI models with expertise in the laws of physics that govern the real, non-digital world. The latest fundraising is backed by both JPMorgan and Blackstone, per the FT.

But that’s just half the story. Prometheus isn’t just building software; it’s building a parallel holding company with a fundraising mission all its own: 

• According to the FT, the holding company aims to acquire stakes in industrial, engineering, design and manufacturing firms that could or would be disrupted by the tech getting cooked up in the AI lab.
• In March, The Wall Street Journal reported that this side of the company is seeking to raise as much as $100 billion to fund its acquisitions, effectively creating an industrials-focused version of SoftBank’s software-heavy Vision funds.

Let’s Get Physical: Of course, Bezos has plenty of experience interspersing digital into the physical realm. Over at Amazon, an army of robot warehouse workers has swelled to roughly 1 million, nearly matching its overall human headcount. In October, The New York Times reported that  Amazon, the second-largest employer in the US, hopes to use robots to avoid hiring some 160,000 humans it would typically need by 2027, and as many as 600,000 by 2033; the ultimate goal is to automate 75% of its logistics operations.