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Jeff Bezos’ AI lab is raising tens of billions of dollars to acquire companies hit by the technology, seeking to capitalise on the disruption that the Amazon founder anticipates will reshape the industrial sector.
Project Prometheus, a code name for a new company led by the tech billionaire and former Google executive Vikram Bajaj, raised $6.2bn late last year.
The funding valued the business at about $30bn, not including the new investment, according to two people with knowledge of that deal.
The financing, from investors including Robert Nelsen, founder of Seattle-based ARCH Venture Partners, supports Prometheus’ bid to use AI to transform manufacturing and industry, according to people familiar with the matter.
The group is separately in new funding talks for a holding company that would invest in groups that Bezos and Bajaj anticipate will be hit by its technology.
According to two people with knowledge of the plans, the new holding company would serve as a “manufacturing transformation vehicle”, with tens of billions at its disposal to acquire businesses.
Venture investors, including Thrive Capital and General Catalyst, have launched vehicles to buy businesses in industries disrupted by AI, hoping they can use technology to improve the margins of these traditional companies. But the scale of Bezos’ plans dwarfs those efforts.
Prometheus is in early discussions with a number of big sovereign wealth funds, including the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, about investing in the holding company.
Bezos was also talking to JPMorgan chief Jamie Dimon about investing, according to those with knowledge of the talks. That investment would come through the bank’s $10bn fund for its Security and Resiliency Initiative, which aims to reinforce American supply chains in critical industries. Bezos is an advisor to the initiative.
Prometheus aims to build novel AI systems that go beyond large language models, with the ability to map the real world and understand design and engineering.
It is targeting the complex manufacturing processes behind objects ranging from jet engines to computer chips, aiming to make these far quicker and less resource-intensive.
The company has acquired data from these industries to begin training its AI systems.
Bezos is co-chief executive, his first management role since stepping down as Amazon’s chief executive in 2021, and is active in day-to-day operations, according to people familiar with the matter.
However, it is also steered by Bajaj and a set of founding team members, including Christian Bodnar and Nal Kalchbrenner, former Microsoft and Google DeepMind research scientists.
It has recruited more than 100 employees, including staff from OpenAI, Google’s DeepMind and Meta, whose technical expertise spans LLMs, computer vision, weather forecasting and optimising advanced computer chips for physics simulations. Prometheus is based in San Francisco with offices in London and Zurich.
Prometheus acquired General Agents in June, the start-up behind Ace, a tool that can search the web and take actions on behalf of users. It also hired the start-up’s founders Sherjil Ozair and William Guss, ex-DeepMind and OpenAI researchers.
The AI lab has also been recruiting engineers near New Delhi to create accurate 3D models of components used to make equipment such as engines, according to people familiar with the company’s plans.
Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs and Yann LeCun’s AMI Labs are developing so-called world models, which use videos to understand the real world. Prometheus was also working on an AI system to navigate the physical world, but its systems are distinct from world models, according to those with knowledge of its plans.
“Figuring out how to reinvent the physical world is a big challenge,” ARCH’s Nelsen, a Prometheus director, told an audience at JPMorgan’s healthcare summit last month. “[But] the pace of innovation in AI right now is truly hard to understate.”
Nelsen added that he believed Prometheus would be “one of the most important companies in the world”.
Prometheus, JPMorgan and ADIA declined to comment.
Additional reporting by Madhumita Murgia and Tim Bradshaw in London and Joshua Franklin in New York
