Bezos Aims $38B Valuation in New Physical AI Venture

Jeff Bezos’s Amazon is said to be on the verge of a $10 billion funding agreement with his AI lab. That is based on a late Monday (April 20) report by Financial Times (FT) that quotes sources with knowledge of the deal who estimate the valuation of the firm at 38 billion. The company, with the code name Project Prometheus, is devoted to artificial intelligence (AI) models that model the behavior of physical world things, otherwise called physical AI.

According to the FT, this deal would enable the company to be among the leading angel-financed startups in the world. Sources indicated that the new deal involves an initial 6.2 billion to be raised in November but has since been extended as demanded. The new funding, as per the report, is independent of a holding company to which Prometheus is also raising tens of billions of dollars. The aim of that endeavor is to gain equity interests in firms it deems will be uprooted by the technology of Prometheus, like engineering, design and architecture firms.

This attempt was discussed by PYMNTS writing about this effort the previous month, but it stated that such a plan on the part of Bezos was impressive not in its extent but in its timing. The proposal came at a time when the industrial capacity, geopolitical priorities and technological capability were converging in a manner that had not been witnessed in generations, that report said.

The approach by Bezos seems to be based on the assumption that these capabilities have hit a tipping point, as opposed to creating new factories, the plan focuses on acquiring the ones that already exist and upgrading them through the use of AI to extract more output, decrease down time and cut costs. It is a bet on AI as infrastructure.

Should the strategy gain momentum, the report added, its impacts will probably be felt beyond the company itself. The competitors may need to implement such technologies in order to survive. The suppliers will be required to integrate with more sophisticated systems. Investors can target those companies that can demonstrate a capability to modernize.

The danger is, of course, the manufacturing environments are more complex and less standardized than digital systems. The implementation of AI into the legacy operations at scale may push the boundaries of the software-focused thinking in the context of the complex and capital-intensive environment.

Project Prometheus belongs to a wave of startups that deals with applying AI AI to physical work, like robotics or drug design. Periodic Labs is a company that was created by people who worked at Meta, OpenAI and DeepMind, among other companies in the AI industry, and launched last year. That firm concentrates on building AI that will enhance discoveries in such disciplines as chemistry and physics.