Jeff Bezos is on the cusp of sealing one of the most eye-watering early-stage fundraisings the artificial intelligence sector has yet produced, with his nascent physical AI laboratory, Project Prometheus, reportedly closing in on a $10bn (£7.9bn) round that would value the venture at $38bn.
The Financial Times, citing people familiar with the matter, reported on Monday that BlackRock and JPMorgan are among the institutional heavyweights that have signed up to the round, though the transaction has yet to be finalised. BlackRock declined to comment. The fundraising, if completed at the mooted terms, would place Prometheus among the most richly valued early-stage AI businesses on the planet, less than six months after it emerged from stealth.
Launched quietly in November 2025 with $6.2bn of initial backing, Prometheus is chasing a very different thesis to the generative AI giants that have dominated the investment cycle since ChatGPT arrived in late 2022. Rather than training ever-larger language models on the internet’s text and imagery, it is building systems that can reason about the physical world itself, materials, tolerances, processes and the immutable laws of physics. The stated target markets are engineering, manufacturing, aerospace, robotics, drug discovery and logistics automation, sectors where large language models have, so far, made only glancing contact.
Running the show on a day-to-day basis is chief executive Vikram Bajaj, a former Google X scientist and co-founder of Foresite Labs. The lab has swelled to more than 120 staff, poached from the likes of OpenAI, xAI, Meta and DeepMind. Bezos, described as one of the initial backers, has been leading the fundraising alongside Bajaj, and, notably, has taken an operational role in the business. It is the first time the Amazon founder has rolled up his sleeves at a technology company since stepping down from the chief executive’s chair at the group he built in 2021.
The timing is striking. Prometheus’s raise is landing only days after Amazon itself committed up to $25bn of fresh investment in Anthropic, securing in return a $100bn cloud-spending pledge from the Claude-maker, a transaction that underlined quite how dramatically the scale of AI infrastructure deals has shifted. A $10bn round for a six-month-old laboratory would, for perspective, exceed the lifetime fundraising of most AI companies in existence.
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