Jeff Bezos is picking up a new title, and no, it’s not another space trophy. The Amazon founder will reportedly become co-CEO of Project Prometheus, a stealthy AI startup he’s helping bankroll — and one of the most aggressively funded early-stage companies in the world.
The New York Times reports that Prometheus has already stacked $6.2 billion in investment, a number that puts it in the same weight class as many public tech companies. The mission: use advanced AI to overhaul how everything from computer chips to cars to spacecraft gets built. Not design — manufacture. It’s a bet that AI can optimize the physical world the way it has optimized digital services.
Prometheus’ other co-CEO is Vik Bajaj, a physicist-chemist hybrid who previously spent time at Google X (the “moonshot factory”) before running Verily, Alphabet’s life-sciences spin-out. If Bezos brings the operator-founder energy, Bajaj brings the deep-tech lab brain.
And they’re not building quietly. The company reportedly has nearly 100 employees already — with résumés pulled from OpenAI, DeepMind, and Meta. In other words, the exact mix of research talent you’d assemble if your plan was to take a blowtorch to traditional manufacturing workflows.
For Bezos, this marks his first real operating role since stepping down as Amazon CEO in 2021. He’s spent the last few years focusing on Blue Origin, which just hit a milestone with the first successful landing of its New Glenn booster. But Prometheus signals a shift: Bezos isn’t just backing AI startups from the sidelines; he’s stepping back into the arena to run one.
The focus on manufacturing is notable. While most AI startups are chasing chatbots, enterprise copilots, or image generators, Prometheus appears to be aiming at the expensive, messy, high-friction world of building physical products. If the company can meaningfully improve yield, speed, or reliability in sectors like aerospace or semiconductors, the impact would be enormous — and extremely profitable.
Still, nearly everything about the company remains under wraps. No product demos, no public roadmap, no whitepapers. Just big checks, big hires, and bigger speculation.
Bezos joining as co-CEO adds even more fuel. It suggests Prometheus is not a vanity side project but a full-force push into defining what the next decade of AI-powered manufacturing looks like. And with its funding and personnel, few startups have more runway to swing for that kind of target.
For now, Prometheus sits in the shadows. But Bezos returning to an operational role — especially in AI — is a signal worth watching. When he moves, the industry usually shifts.
And he just moved.