On June 11, 2026, Prometheus, an AI startup co-founded by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and former Verily co-founder Vik Bajaj, announced that it had completed a huge US$12 billion in financing, with a post-investment valuation of US$41 billion. The company is committed to building the world's first "Artificial General Engineer" with the goal of using AI to automate the design and manufacturing of complex physical systems from jet engines to drug molecules.
"General Physical Engineer": AI enters the physical world
Compared with the current mainstream focus on text, images or code Unlike AI, Prometheus's ambition is to bridge the gap between digital intelligence and physical manufacturing. Its core technology is an AI system that can understand multi-disciplinary knowledge such as engineering principles, materials science, thermodynamics, and fluid mechanics. It can independently complete the following tasks:
Design new aeroengine blades and simulate extreme operating conditions;
Generating compound structures with specific pharmacological effects from scratch and predicting their biological activities;
Optimize chip heat dissipation architecture or battery electrode microstructure;
Automatically generate mechanical assembly drawings and manufacturing processes that comply with safety specifications.
According to TechCrunch reported that Prometheus currently has offices in San Francisco, London and Zurich with a team of about 150 people, but has not disclosed any specific product details. Bezos revealed that most of the funds raised in this round will be used to build ultra-large-scale AI computing infrastructure to support its high-fidelity simulation and training of the physical world.
Bezos's view: AI will trigger "labor scarcity", not unemployment
It is worth noting that Bezos is The perception of the employment impact of AI is in sharp contrast to the mainstream of the industry. When Anthropic CEO Amodi and others warned that "AI will lead to long-term mass unemployment," Bezos proposed the concept of "labor scarcity":
"The huge productivity improvement brought by AI will transform the structure of society's demand for manpower. In the future, many families may change from dual employees to single employees, and the overtime culture will fade. This is not the disappearance of jobs, but the liberation of mankind from repeated labor."
This optimistic narrative coincides with many A key point for AI companies to prepare for IPO. Analysts point out that capital markets prefer "growth and prosperity" stories to "unemployment and crisis" warnings. But Bezos, relying on his experience managing more than 1.5 million employees at Amazon, emphasized that the ultimate value of AI lies in improving per capita output and quality of life, rather than simply replacing human resources.
Luxury investment lineup, betting on "Physical AI" track
This round of financing was led by Bezos personally, and JPMorgan Chase (Top financial institutions such as JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and BlackRock followed. This is Prometheus's second large-scale fundraising round after its first round of US$6.2 billion at the end of 2025.
investors are generally optimistic aboutA long-standing barrier to "Physical AI" tracks. Compared with pure software AI, which is easy to copy, the physical world itself constitutes a natural moat-real materials, manufacturing processes, safety regulations, experimental verification and other aspects are difficult to bypass by code alone. Therefore, AI systems that can truly implement real industries have stronger commercial sustainability and competitive defense capabilities.
Industry significance: AI competition has entered a new stage of "hyper-digital reality"
The rise of Prometheus marks that global AI competition is moving from "digital content generation" to "physical world transformation." Previously, Mistral AI launched the industrial agent platform Vibe, and Xiaomi MiMo-V2.5-Pro implemented independent programming and circuit optimization, both of which have shown a trend of AI penetration into the physical field.
And Prometheus takes this trend to the extreme-it is not satisfied with being an "assistant engineer" but wants to become an "AI engineer who independently completes end-to-end engineering tasks." If successful, this will be the closest milestone for AGI (General Artificial Intelligence) to practical use in the vertical field.
As AI begins to design aircraft, synthesize drugs, and build factories, how will the role of human engineers evolve? Bezos's answer is: from executor to commander. Prometheus's gamble is not only a technological leap, but also a recalibration of the definition of "the value of human labor." This physical revolution, sparked by $12 billion, may determine the pattern of global manufacturing and technological innovation in the next decade.