Jeff Bezos Just Re-Entered the C-Suite With a $6 Billion AI Bet

Jeff Bezos is back in business. According to The New York Times, the Amazon founder is launching a new artificial intelligence startup focused on AI for manufacturing industries. The startup, called Project Prometheus, was co-founded with Vik Bajaj, a physicist and chemist with ties to Google co-founder Sergey Brin. The startup has reportedly already secured $6.2 billion in funding.

Bajaj was previously the director of Alphabet’s X, the name for the company’s moonshot lab that experimented with novel technologies. X was known for zany projects, like experimenting with fly brains to create better neural networks or Project Loon, which beamed down internet signals from balloons in the stratosphere (it shuttered in 2021). But these projects rarely had a path to profitability. Bajaj left X in 2016 to found Verily, a health-tech startup also owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet, Inc. 

According to the Times, Project Prometheus already has about 100 employees poached from companies like OpenAI, DeepMind, and Meta. It also marks Jeff Bezos’s re-entrance into the C-Suite. The Amazon founder had stepped down from the company’s chief executive position in 2021; Andy Jassy replaced him. 

A handful of companies are already experimenting with automating aspects of manufacturing. One of them, Atomic Industries—founded by Austin Bishop, a notable figure in America’s techno-industrial revival—is building AI that helps design key factory components without the help of specialists. While it’s still unclear what exactly Project Prometheus is doing, the Times reported that the firm has goals similar to Periodic Labs, a startup founded by former OpenAI researchers that uses LLMs to speed up scientific discovery.