Jeff Bezos has returned to a CEO role to lead a new engineering-focused AI startup, Project Prometheus, The New York Times reports. The company, which has reportedly secured a massive $6.2 billion in initial funding, aims to apply artificial intelligence to physical industries, including aerospace, automotive, and computing hardware.
Bezos, who stepped down as Amazon CEO in 2021, will serve as co-CEO alongside Vik Bajaj, a physicist and former Google X executive known for his work at Verily Life Sciences. The startup’s mission is to build “AI for the physical economy,” focusing on systems that can learn from and manipulate the physical world rather than solely processing digital information like current chatbots.
With offices planned for San Francisco, London, and Zurich, Project Prometheus has already recruited nearly 100 employees, including top talent from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Meta. The company intends to develop models that accelerate scientific discovery and manufacturing processes, a goal that aligns closely with Bezos’s long-standing interests in space exploration through his company Blue Origin.
The $6.2 billion war chest makes Project Prometheus one of the best-funded early-stage startups in history, signaling a major push to compete in the rapidly evolving “physical AI” sector.
