Already the founder of Amazon—which owns the world’s largest cloud company, has a huge stake in Anthropic, and runs its own AI efforts—Jeff Bezos co-founded Prometheus in late 2025. It’s a new AI lab that aims to help engineers design and manufacture high-tech products. In June, Prometheus announced it had raised $12 billion at a valuation of $41 billion, and for the first time revealed new details of its work. “We’re building tools that will make it much easier for engineers to design physical objects,” Bezos told CNBC at the time, claiming that Prometheus was making progress toward “a set of tools that could actually do engineering—an artificial general engineer.”
It’s still early days, but Bezos knows more than most AI founders about how to turn bits on a screen into moving atoms in the real world. He is “a singular strategist of the physical economy,” says Vik Bajaj, Bezos’ co-founder and co-CEO at Prometheus. “What we are trying to do now is metaphorically related” to Amazon’s success in e-commerce, Bajaj says. “Can we take the entire physical design cycle and understand it end to end, represented using machine learning technologies?”
Success would mean translating digital AI into material advances that, in a best-case scenario, could result in a rapid acceleration of scientific progress. That would deliver on AI advocates’ most fundamental argument to the public about why their project is worthwhile—benefits that until now have felt fairly distant, especially as the gulf has widened between rich and poor in the U.S. amid the AI boom.
Disclosure: TIME has a content and technology partnership with Amazon