Jeff Bezos re-enters the AI race with Project Prometheus
Prometheus is expected to bring AI into the physical world, promising breakthroughs in engineering, manufacturing, and real-world innovation.
Jeff Bezos might be done running Amazon day to day, but apparently, he’s not done building things. A new report from The New York Times says the billionaire is stepping back into something he hasn’t done in years: operating a company directly. He’s now co-CEO of an AI startup called Project Prometheus, which somehow raised a staggering $6.2 billion before even showing its first product.
But this doesn't seem like some billionaire hobby project. Bezos is sharing the top seat with Vik Bajaj, a heavyweight who helped build Google’s life sciences division and co-founded Verily. Bajaj also helped launch Foresite Labs before leaving to focus fully on Prometheus, which should tell you how serious the ambition is.
If it feels like Bezos is inching his way back into operator mode, that’s because he is. Since stepping down as Amazon's CEO in 2021, he’s stayed close as Executive Chairman, weighing in on major strategic decisions. But Prometheus is the first time in years he’s actually getting back into the trenches instead of advising from the boardroom.
Ogbonda Chivumnovu
So what exactly is Project Prometheus all about?
Prometheus describes its mission as “AI for the physical economy,” a line that points toward engineering and manufacturing rather than chatbots and content generators. Bezos likely wants to build AI models that understand and simulate the real world across aerospace, automotive, computing, energy—essentially the backbone of industrial innovation.
It’s the same frontier companies like Periodic Labs are chasing: where AI stops predicting words and starts predicting how the world works. That ambition is already reflected in the talent. Prometheus has nearly 100 employees, including researchers poached from Meta, OpenAI, and Google DeepMind, a signal that it’s not entering the AI race quietly.
After news of Prometheus broke, Elon Musk posted “Haha no way, copy 🐈,” his shorthand for Bezos stepping into a space Musk sees himself dominating with Tesla, Optimus, SpaceX robotics, and xAI. The reaction wasn’t just trolling, as it underlined the competitive tension in a field where every major tech leader believes their vision of AI is the one that will shape the future.
But the bigger story is that Bezos is back in operator mode, and he’s betting big on industrial AI, the kind that builds things, designs things, tests things, and eventually reshapes entire sectors. If Prometheus succeeds, it positions Bezos in a part of the AI race that feels far more foundational than text generators or chat interfaces.
The takeaway
Whether Prometheus becomes the next AWS-sized success or just Bezos’ most ambitious experiment remains to be seen. But one clear thing is that he didn’t return to play around. And based on the talent he’s recruited, and the rivals already reacting, the next phase of the AI race might not happen on the consumer internet at all. It might happen in the machines, labs, and factories that keep the physical world running.
Emmanuel Oyedeji
