Jeff Bezos' clandestine artificial intelligence venture, Project Prometheus, is on the verge of securing an additional $10 billion in a blockbuster funding round led by Wall Street giants JPMorgan and BlackRock, according to a Financial Times report. The imminent deal, which follows a $6.2 billion seed round in late 2025, will catapult the startup's valuation to a staggering $38 billion as institutional investor demand massively oversubscribed the offering.

Why so much interest in Bezos’ AI lab?

Project Prometheus is touted as a physical AI laboratory that has the tech billionaire Jeff Bezos back to serving an operational role again, since leaving Amazon in 2021.

The company aims to build novel AI systems that understand the physical laws of the universe and can interact with the physical environment, especially in manufacturing and industrial processes. Such systems are quite different from the AI models by OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and other popular LLM companies. 

The major challenge for companies building physical AI systems is usually the data moat. Large-language models are trained on texts, code, images, and data scraped from the internet, which are readily available and in abundance. 

Physical AI requires real-world interaction data, like sensor readings, manufacturing processes, tactile feedback, trajectories, failures in messy environments, etc., which are usually proprietary and expensive to collect. 

Elon Musk’s Tesla is a good textbook case of the data situation in physical AI space. Tesla reportedly has 5-6 million electric cars fitted with Full Self-Driving (Supervised) hardware and software, driving more than 50 billion miles every year. The real-world driving data collected gives the company an edge over competitors in improving the self-driving experience.

That’s a leverage Prometheus is going to pursue with the freshly raised capital, with the goal of becoming “one of the most important companies in the world,” says Arch’s Nelsen, a Prometheus director. But the AI company wants to do this through a holding company. 

Prometheus will shop companies for data

Bezos and Prometheus co-chief executive Vikram Bajaj, a former Google executive, are also leading separate talks to raise tens of billions of dollars for the holding company, according to people familiar with the matter. 

All those billions will mostly go toward acquiring companies, especially in the areas of engineering, architecture, and design companies, which two execs believe would be disrupted by Prometheus. The holding company would serve more like a “manufacturing transformation vehicle,” the people said. 

With investments in such businesses, the company can collect real-world data to train Prometheus AI systems. The AI lab is mostly still in its early phase. It has recruited over 100 employees, including talent from big names like Meta, OpenAI, and DeepMind. 

In other news, Amazon has also invested an additional $5 billion in Anthropic, with the option to commit up to $20 billion more over time. Anthropic is committed to spending over $100 billion on AWS technologies over the next decade, as part of the new deal, Cryptopolitan reported Tuesday. 

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