Jeff Bezos is in early talks to raise $100 billion for a fund that would acquire manufacturing companies and use AI to automate their operations, the Wall Street Journal reported, with the Amazon founder having traveled to the Middle East a few months ago to discuss the fund directly with sovereign wealth fund representatives in the region as part of the fundraising effort.
The fund, described in investor documents as a "manufacturing transformation vehicle," would target companies in chipmaking, defence, aerospace and automotive sectors. It would deploy AI developed by Project Prometheus, a startup Bezos co-founded with former Google Verily co-founder Vik Bajaj in late 2025, where he now serves as co-CEO.
Project Prometheus has raised $6.2 billion and is separately seeking up to $6 billion more. Bezos also more recently traveled to Singapore to court investors. The talks remain at a preliminary stage.
If it closes at that scale, the fund would rival SoftBank's $100 billion Vision Fund as the largest private investment vehicle ever assembled, and like the Vision Fund before it, its viability would depend heavily on Gulf sovereign capital.
The Middle East pitch places Bezos in a queue of Silicon Valley's most prominent founders who have made the trip to Abu Dhabi, Riyadh and Doha in the past 18 months seeking capital at a scale that no other class of investor can provide.
Sam Altman flew to the UAE in January to meet sovereign wealth funds for an OpenAI round that Bloomberg reported could total at least $50 billion, at a valuation of $750 billion to $830 billion. Abu Dhabi's MGX had already participated in a $6.6 billion OpenAI secondary sale in October 2025 and was among the funds Altman was targeting. OpenAI has also partnered with G42 on a 5-gigawatt data centre cluster in Abu Dhabi as part of the broader Stargate infrastructure project.
Dario Amodei's Anthropic took Gulf money for the first time in September 2025, with QIA joining the company's record $13 billion Series F at a $183 billion valuation. That followed a fraught internal debate at Anthropic over whether to accept Gulf capital at all. In a leaked internal memo, Amodei acknowledged "a truly giant amount of capital in the Middle East, easily $100 billion or more" and said that without it, staying on the frontier of AI development would be "substantially harder." FWDstart reported on the round at the time, noting that Amodei had framed any Gulf investment as "narrowly scoped, purely financial" with no governance rights, a reversal from Anthropic's earlier position of declining Saudi capital on national security grounds.
Elon Musk's xAI has also drawn Gulf investment, and QIA has separately built out a $3 billion venture capital Fund of Funds programme that now backs 12 international VC firms, several of whom are establishing offices in Doha.
Saudi Arabia's PIF committed $36.2 billion to AI initiatives in 2025 alone, making it the single largest dealmaker globally, while Abu Dhabi's Mubadala deployed $12.9 billion across AI and digital assets in the same period. Together, the seven largest Gulf wealth funds represented 43% of all sovereign capital invested worldwide last year.
Bezos's fund is different from the AI model training and infrastructure plays that have defined most Gulf tech investment to date. Project Prometheus is building AI systems that simulate and predict physical-world behaviour, such as how air flows around aircraft wings or where a metal part might crack under pressure, allowing engineers to test designs digitally rather than through months of costly physical prototyping. The fund would acquire established manufacturers and apply that technology to accelerate their automation.
The approach is closer to a private equity roll-up than a venture investment: buy companies with valuable intellectual property but outdated processes, integrate Prometheus's AI, and extract margin through automation. Axios noted that the strategy is focused on pre-production optimisation, inputs and materials, rather than the assembly-line robot replacement that critics have seized on.
Whether Gulf funds commit at the scale Bezos is seeking remains to be seen. As Axios observed, SoftBank's Vision Fund is the only private vehicle to have ever raised that much, and it was heavily reliant on Middle Eastern sovereigns who, amid regional conflict and heightened geopolitical uncertainty, "may be holding onto their wallets a bit tighter right now."
The timing is of course complicated. Gulf funds are being asked to underwrite a $100 billion bet on American manufacturing automation at the same moment their home economies are navigating the fallout from the Iranian strikes, market volatility and a more cautious regional investment environment.
But if the past 18 months have demonstrated anything, it is that when Silicon Valley needs capital at nine or ten figures, the flight path runs through Abu Dhabi, Riyadh and Doha before anywhere else.
