Jeff Bezos is in early discussions with investors in the Middle East and Asia to raise as much as $100 billion for an investment fund that would operate alongside his new artificial intelligence start-up, Project Prometheus, according to three people familiar with the talks.
The fund could be among the world’s largest, matching the $100 billion Vision Fund managed by the Japanese conglomerate SoftBank, which is focused on investment in new technologies.
Mr. Bezos’ fund would invest in or even purchase companies that could benefit from the technology under development at Project Prometheus, which is working on A.I. to improve engineering and manufacturing in a number of fields, including computing and aerospace.
Started by Mr. Bezos, the founder of Amazon, and Vik Bajaj, a former Google researcher, Project Prometheus has raised $6.2 billion from Mr. Bezos himself and others.
His investment fund would be part of the same holding company as the start-up, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not allowed to discuss it publicly.
Some details related to the new fund were first reported by the Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal.
Mr. Bezos said in a conference in Italy in October that A.I.’s biggest impact was going to be how it would affect every company in the world, including manufacturers. “It is going to make their quality go up and their productivity go up,” he said. “I mean by every company I literally mean every company.”
Project Prometheus is among several new efforts to apply A.I. to physical tasks, including robotics, drug design, scientific discovery, engineering and manufacturing. Much as OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot learned to write by analyzing massive amounts of digital text, other A.I. systems can learn skills by pinpointing patterns in data collected from physical experience and behavior.
In 2024, Mr. Bezos invested in Physical Intelligence, a start-up that is applying A.I. to robots. Last year, several researchers left Meta, OpenAI, Google DeepMind and other prominent A.I. projects to create Periodic Labs, which aims to accelerate discoveries in physics, chemistry and other areas.
With Mr. Bezos and Dr. Bajaj serving as co-chief executives, Project Prometheus hopes to improve the efficiency of companies that design and build computers, automobiles, spacecraft and other physical products. Mr. Bezos’ new fund would invest in such companies.
His new A.I. start-up could also help Mr. Bezos’ existing investments, such as the rocket company, Blue Origin. David Limp, a former Amazon executive who now leads Blue Origin, has been appointed to the Project Prometheus board of directors.
Dr. Bajaj is a physicist and chemist who worked closely with Google co-founder Sergey Brin at Google’s X, a research effort nicknamed “The Moonshot Factory.” Google X incubated a wide range of ambitious projects, including the drone delivery service Wing and the self-driving car company Waymo.
In 2015, Dr. Bajaj was among the founders of Verily, a research lab dedicated to the life sciences. Like Waymo and Wing, Verify is operated by Google’s parent company, Alphabet.
Dr. Bajaj later co-founded and served as chief executive of Foresite Labs, an effort to create A.I. and data science start-ups. He left that job to focus on Project Prometheus.
Cade Metz is a Times reporter who writes about artificial intelligence, driverless cars, robotics, virtual reality and other emerging areas of technology.
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