10AM Hour: Exclusive: Jeff Bezos with Co-CEO of New AI Startup ‘Prometheus’ 6/11/26

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Carl Quintanilla (1:00)

Good Thursday morning, welcome to Squawk on the Street. I'm Carl Quintanilla with Leslie Picker, live at Postal 9 of the New York Stock Exchange. David Faber is live today in San Francisco, where he will be joined in just a moment by Amazon's founder, Jeff Bezos, along with Vic Bejage, his co-founder at AI Startup Prometheus, as the company breaks some news around its latest funding round. Also this hour, on the lookout for Supreme Court opinions, as we await a potential decision on the president's authority to fire Fed Governor Lisa Cook. We will get you headlines as soon as we get them. Quick check on the market on this Thursday. There are so many pots boiling. We're trying to get to break even S&P for the week, which would be around $73.84.

Chips are leading today after being down for the past five sessions. But between the ECB, Leslie, SpaceX, Oracle and the inflation prints, it's a very complex backdrop today.

Sara Eisen (1:50)

Not to mention what's going on geopolitically as well with regard to Iran and the US and its potential appetite to, you know, exacerbate aggression.

Carl Quintanilla (2:00)

Yeah. Even though oil doesn't seem to be buying as much as we got West Texas and Brent still in the red. Let's get to Faber in San Francisco.

David Faber (2:09)

Thank you, Carl. Prometheus is a startup co-founded by Jeff Bezos and Vic Bejaj. It is raising its Series B round to $12 billion, and it does value the company now at roughly $41 billion. That's new news. The company has been largely quiet until now. Its ambitions, though, are broad, using AI to accelerate engineering across the physical economy, from chips to jet engines to batteries, solar, manufacturing.

Joining us now on CNBC Exclusive is Prometheus' co-founders and co-CEO, Jeff Bezos. Guys, thanks for having us here.

Good morning, David. Good morning to you as well. Jeff, let me just start with you. You know, we say physical AI. I just read that. I don't know how many people even understand what your ambitions are. So briefly explain sort of what Prometheus is trying to do.

Jeff Bezos (2:57)

Well, if you back up and think about, draw the box really big around all of civilization.

What drives the wealth of nations? What drives civilizational wealth?

And the answer is invention. It's what really is driving it. Six thousand years ago, somebody invented the plow and we all got wealthier. Much later, somebody invented the steam engine and we all got wealthier. These things drive productivity. It's true that somebody invented the solar cell and it's continued to get better and better and better. We all got wealthier. And so, our goal at Prometheus, what we're working on is building a set of tools that accelerate that invention loop. So, how long does it take to improve something? How long does it take from idea to actually manufacturing, seeing it rate and have a useful object? And so, that's really what's going on. This is an age-old dream, the idea that you might build a set of tools that can actually do engineering, an artificial engineer. An artificial general engineer, it's a dream that we've had, people thought about for decades, but it's never really been possible. But now it is, and that's what we've been working on since late 2024 Right. It's very exciting. We have a team of about 150 people. They've already done remarkable work. It's hard work.

We're grinding, but it's also very interesting.

David Faber (4:20)

Well, Jeff mentions things have changed. So put in perspective what has. Obviously, we all know the introduction of ChatGPT a number of years ago, and what we're seeing and reporting on every day, but specifically the applications you're looking for, what has changed that allows you to pursue them in the way you are?