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Key Takeaways
- Jeff Bezos, the founder and former CEO of Amazon, is funding and leading a startup focused on applying AI to the manufacturing and engineering fields, The New York Times reported.
- His latest venture—Project Prometheus—has $6.2 billion in funding and about 100 employees, the Times said.
It’s back to the future for Jeff Bezos.
The 61-year-old Amazon (AMZN) founder is once again leading a team that aims to develop the technology of tomorrow. Bezos will be co-CEO of Project Prometheus, an AI startup focused on manufacturing and engineering, in fields including computers, cars and aerospace,The New York Times reported Monday.
Project Prometheus—named for a Greek Titan who stole fire from the gods and shared it with humans—has $6.2 billion in funding, including a contribution from Bezos, and about 100 staffers, the Times said. Bezos, the world’s third-richest person according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, hasn’t been officially responsible for a company’s operations since he gave up the CEO post at Amazon in 2021.
Why This News Matters to You
Bezos is one of the world’s richest people, with a record as one of the biggest business builders of his era. The news that he’s co-founding another company signals his intent to be among the business leaders of the coming decades, too.
Not much is widely known about Project Prometheus. What appears to be its LinkedIn page includes little beyond the tagline “AI for the physical economy.” Its co-founder and co-CEO, Vik Bajaj, helped fund a life sciences lab at Alphabet (GOOG), worked on health and therapeutic endeavors and, most recently, led an AI and data science incubator, according to his LinkedIn profile.
A la Elon Musk, Bezos has his hands in a number of other projects. Bezos as lately refocused the opinion section at The Washington Post, which he purchased a dozen years ago; and sent an all-female crew into space at Blue Origin, the aerospace company he founded. (Bezos also steers environmental and early education philanthropic groups.)
Project Prometheus may build on Bezos’ interest in space. Bezos argued at a tech conference that factories, data centers and other industrial operations should move to the moon or orbital facilities to mitigate pollution on earth.
“The moon is a gift from the universe,” Bezos said, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Another tech titan, Meta (META) CEO Mark Zuckerberg, is also eyeing a Prometheus project—a 1 gigawatt AI “supercluster” with a more down-to-earth location: New Albany, Ohio, according to Inc., an entrepreneur-focused news outlet.
