Project Prometheus Led By Jeff Bezos Gets A $6.2B War Chest For Disruptive AI Breakthroughs

by Aaron Leong — Monday, November 17, 2025, 10:28 AM EDT

Jeff Bezos, the billionaire founder who stepped away from the operational role of Amazon in 2021, has unexpectedly returned to the C-suite, reportedly co-founding and taking on the role of co-CEO for a new, skunkworks-like artificial intelligence startup named Project Prometheus. The announcement (first reported on by The New York Times) confirms months of building rumors and firmly plants Bezos—and his considerable bankroll—in the expensive and fiercely competitive race for AI supremacy.

This is not another consumer-focused LLM chatbot venture, though; Project Prometheus is taking aim at the real world, focusing on AI systems designed to gain knowledge and execute tasks within the engineering and aerospace markets.

The vision is definitely ambitious: to create (and apply) AI capable of revolutionizing computing, aerospace, automotive, and other physical industries, aligning with Bezos' passion project, Blue Origin. The new company is said to be dedicated to cracking the AI code that can truly support and accelerate complex engineering and production processes, a capability that could give Bezos a possible leg-up in his rivalry with Elon Musk’s domains, e.g. SpaceX, Neuralink, xAI, etc. Parties familiar with the plans indicate that this commitment is backed by an enormous funding pool of $6.2 billion (some of which comes from Bezos' own pocket), a staggering sum that instantly gives Project Prometheus a massive cash advantage over other similar start-ups.

bajaj1 — *Vik Bajaj (Credit: Foresite Labs)*

Bezos is embarking on this mission with co-founder and co-CEO Dr. Vik Bajaj, a physicist and chemist with an impressive pedigree from Google X's "Moonshot Factory," where Bajaj was part of projects like the Wing drone delivery service and the autonomous vehicle initiative that eventually became Waymo. Bajaj, who is still listed as CEO of the AI and data science incubator Foresite Labs on LinkedIn, combined with Bezos' aggressive operational expertise is already attracting elite talent. Project Prometheus has reportedly hired nearly 100 employees including top researchers and engineers from industry leaders like OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Meta.

While other organizations continue to push the boundaries of LLM with even predicting scientific breakthroughs from these digital systems, Project Prometheus joins a wave of well-funded firms betting on a different frontier. These companies, including the newly formed Periodic Labs, are exploring models that learn through real-world, physical trial-and-error, often involving robotics.