Jeff Bezos launches industrial AI startup Project Prometheus

​​Jeff Bezos has spent the last few years perfecting the aesthetic of a man who owns both a megayacht and the clothes to match it. Now he’s turning his attention to something less photogenic and far more revealing: an AI startup designed for industrial work.

According to a New York Times report, Bezos has quietly taken on his first formal operational role since leaving Amazon in 2021, as co-chief executive of a new company called Project Prometheus, a still-semi-stealth AI startup aimed at the engineering and manufacturing heart of the economy. The company has already raised around $6.2 billion in funding, some of it from Bezos himself, instantly placing it among the most well-funded early-stage AI companies in the world.

Bezos won’t run it alone. He is expected to share the top job with Vik Bajaj, a physicist and chemist who previously worked at Google’s “moonshot” X Lab and Verily, Alphabet’s health technology spin-out. The Prometheus project has reportedly hired around 100 people so far, drawing on researchers and engineers from OpenAI, DeepMind and Meta’s AI group, suggesting a company built for scale and not experimentation.

The mandate is narrower and more concrete than most large AI projects. The Prometheus Project is not interested in taking over the now crowded AI chatbot market or creating a consumer application. Its focus runs deeper, in the application of AI to manufacturing, engineering and hardware systems – from computers to cars to spaceships. This mission places the company squarely in the wake of broader industrial change, where AI bottlenecks are increasingly tied to real-world constraints – chips, manufacturing, energy, supply chains, etc. – rather than just software.

In fact, Bezos is betting that AI’s next advantage will come from having the tools that shape how things are built, not just how questions are answered.

Bezos has become a prolific AI investor since stepping away from Amazon, backing search startup Perplexity, humanoid robot maker Figure AI and AI data labeling company Toloka, as well as KoBold Metals, which uses machine learning to search for critical minerals. But Project Prometheus is the moment when Bezos stops just writing checks and starts signing operating documents again.

The timing aligns perfectly with a broader shift in the technology industry, where Big Tech is increasingly becoming Big Energy. As the AI ​​boom accelerates, the bottlenecks have shifted from clever algorithms to stubborn physical constraints. Hyperscalers sign long-term power contracts, data center builders compete for network capacity, and industrial AI has become the place where software ambitions meet transformation sites and supply chains. The Prometheus project fits directly into this trend, positioning itself as a sort of brain layer for the machines and manufacturing lines that everyone will need.

There are still big unknowns. The actual product roadmap, customers, timeline and headquarters location remain undetermined. But the capital, the board role, the talent search – it all adds up to a clear message: This is a serious bet, not a vanity project.

And while Project Prometheus lives up to its name, Bezos isn’t just getting back into the fray: he’s trying to give the industry a new kind of fire.