Businessman Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, is in early talks to raise approximately $100 billion for a new fund focused on acquiring industrial companies, with an ambitious goal: to accelerate manufacturing automation using artificial intelligence, according to The Wall Street Journal (WSJ).
Amazon's founder has been meeting with some of the world's largest asset managers to structure the project. In recent months, Bezos traveled to the Middle East, where he presented the initiative to representatives of sovereign wealth funds. More recently, he was in Singapore seeking new investors, according to people familiar with the negotiations.
Described to potential investors as a "manufacturing transformation vehicle," the fund aims to acquire companies in strategic sectors such as semiconductors, defense, and aerospace. Given its intended size, the project would place Bezos on par with initiatives like SoftBank's Vision Fund, also worth $100 billion, although focused on technology.
The strategy is directly linked to Project Prometheus, the AI startup that Bezos became co-CEO of last year. The company develops models capable of understanding and simulating the physical world, a frontier of artificial intelligence that has been attracting increasing amounts of capital.
Bezos' idea is to apply this technology to companies acquired by the fund to increase productivity and margins, in a move similar to what investment funds have already been doing in areas such as accounting and real estate management.
According to sources cited by the WSJ, Project Prometheus is discussing a funding round that could reach $6 billion. Recently, the company appointed Dave Limp, CEO of Blue Origin, to its board. Bezos founded the space company in 2000 and continues to invest billions of dollars annually in the business.
While much of the AI race has been dominated by large language models, there is a growing flow of investment in solutions geared towards robotics, engineering, and manufacturing—areas that require systems capable of handling physical space, materials, and mechanical forces.
In this context, Bezos joins other veteran names in Silicon Valley. Travis Kalanick, former CEO of Uber, relaunched his startup Atoms with a focus on smart manufacturing, while Elon Musk has been reinforcing Tesla's plans to develop humanoid robots to investors.
Taking the lead on Project Prometheus marks Bezos' first formal executive role at a technology company since stepping down as chairman of Amazon in 2021.
Prometheus initially intends to sell engineering simulation and design software. Applications include predicting the behavior of materials under stress or simulating airflow in aircraft wings, according to documents presented to investors.
Bezos shares the CEO role with Vik Bajaj, a professor at Stanford School of Medicine and co-founder of Verily, Google's life sciences arm. The startup also recruited talent from labs like OpenAI and Google DeepMind and raised $6.2 billion last year.
The WSJ also learned that JPMorgan Chase is in preliminary talks to support the initiative through its newly created Security and Resilience Initiative, a $10 billion fund launched in December. To lead the project, the bank hired Todd Combs, a former Berkshire Hathaway manager.
