100 billion dollars. This is the figure that Bezos is raising for a new fund. According to an exclusive report by the WSJ on March 19, this fund, called the "Industrial Transformation Tool," will specifically acquire industrial companies in the chip manufacturing, defense, and aerospace sectors, and then transform them using AI.

This figure is as large as that of the SoftBank Vision Fund. But the money is heading to completely different places.

The Vision Fund invested 98.6 billion dollars in internet platform companies like Uber, WeWork, and DoorDash in 2017. Eight years later, Bezos is targeting not those who write code, but those who operate machine tools.

This is not an isolated investment. Last year, Bezos joined Project Prometheus as co-CEO, a startup that simulates physical world behaviors using AI, which has already raised 6.2 billion dollars. Another co-CEO, Vikram Bajaj, is a co-founder of Google’s life sciences division, Verily. This new 100 billion dollar fund will find real-world scenarios for Prometheus's models—buy factories and then integrate the models into them.

Blue Origin CEO David Limp has already joined Prometheus's board. Bezos has recently traveled to Singapore and the Middle East, with reports from the FT indicating that the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority and J.P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon are at the negotiation table.

The Money in AI is Becoming "Heavy"

Looking at this fund within the panorama of AI capital over the past two years, the trend is very clear.

According to Crunchbase, global AI venture capital is expected to reach 89.4 billion dollars by 2025, with foundational model companies taking home 80 billion dollars. OpenAI alone raised 40 billion, Anthropic raised a cumulative 16.5 billion over two rounds in the year, and Elon Musk's xAI raised over 42 billion. Most of this money is used for training models and renting computing power.

At the same time, the four major cloud providers—Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft—are set to invest about 320 billion dollars in data centers by 2025. According to Goldman Sachs, this figure will exceed 527 billion dollars by 2026. The Stargate Project has even proposed a 500 billion dollar multi-year investment plan. According to predictions from the Dell'Oro Group, global data center capital expenditures are expected to surpass 1 trillion dollars for the first time in 2026.

All of this money is doing the same thing: making AI run faster. But Bezos's 100 billion is not for computing power; he wants to buy production capacity.

Prometheus has rented a 30,000 square foot office in San Francisco's financial district and is currently looking for a space at least twice that size. But its core ambition is not in San Francisco—it's in factories.

Chip Giants Are Voting with Their Feet

On the same day Bezos announced the fundraising, Samsung announced it will invest more than 110 trillion won (about 73.3 billion dollars) in chip capacity expansion and R&D by 2026. According to Bloomberg, this is Samsung's largest annual chip investment commitment ever, 22% higher than the 90.4 trillion won in 2025. This 110 trillion won includes both capital expenditures and R&D, with Samsung's 2025 split being 52.7 trillion won for capital expenditures and 37.7 trillion won for R&D.

Looking only at the capital expenditure metrics, Samsung's chip capex for 2026 also exceeds TSMC's estimated capital expenditure budget of about 52 to 56 billion dollars for that year. For the first time in history, Samsung's annual chip investment surpasses TSMC.

Samsung's money is primarily betting on high-bandwidth memory (HBM)—the core supply chain for NVIDIA AI processors. According to Samsung co-CEO Choi Yong-hoon at the earnings call, "The emergence of Agentic AI is driving an explosive growth in customer orders." Samsung needs to reclaim the dominant position in the HBM market from SK Hynix.

On the same chart, Intel's trajectory is completely the opposite. Intel's capital expenditures are expected to plummet 39% to 14.7 billion dollars in 2025, with a further contraction expected to 12 to 14 billion dollars in 2026. According to TrendForce analysis, Intel's foundry business has yet to win major external customers, caught between TSMC's scale and Samsung's willingness to invest.

According to the same Bloomberg report, the South Korean government has also launched a 23 billion dollar support plan for the semiconductor industry during the same period. Samsung's record investment combined with government support points to the same direction: AI capital is accelerating its flow from the software layer to the physical layer.

The Middle East is Betting at Every Level

Bezos's LP list itself is a geopolitical capital map.

According to the FT, the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA) is a potential LP for this 100 billion dollar manufacturing fund. This means that Middle Eastern sovereign capital has expanded its layout in the AI sector from the model layer to the manufacturing layer.

Abu Dhabi's AI-focused fund MGX has invested in Anthropic, xAI, and Databricks, while also participating in the AI Infrastructure Partnership led by BlackRock and Microsoft (which plans to invest 100 billion dollars in AI infrastructure), and has participated in the 40 billion dollar acquisition of data center operator Aligned Data Centers by NVIDIA and Microsoft. Mubadala has invested in Anthropic, and over the past four years completed eight AI-related transactions.

The path of Saudi PIF is slightly different—it is discussing a 40 billion dollar cooperative fund with a16z, while planning to build 6GW of data center capacity in Saudi Arabia by 2034 through its subsidiary Humain. According to Global SWF data, sovereign funds in the Gulf Cooperation Council region globally deployed 136 billion dollars in 2024, accounting for 54% of global sovereign fund capital flows.

But some doors are closed. According to public reports, Anthropic explicitly rejected investment from Saudi PIF in the last funding round, citing national security. The money in the model layer is not accessible to everyone, but there are no such barriers in the infrastructure and manufacturing layers.

This fund is still in the early negotiation phase, and specific acquisition targets and LP shares have not been disclosed. But the direction has already been drawn. Bezos is not investing in a model; he is investing in a supply chain.

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