Jeff Bezos has reportedly been traveling around the Middle East and Southeast Asia trying to raise in the region of $100 billion to transform major industries with artificial intelligence.

As first reported today by the Wall Street Journal, Bezos has met with some of the region’s largest asset managers and presented prospective investors with a plan to transform various manufacturing industries, including chipmaking, defense and aerospace, in what documents stated would become a “manufacturing transformation vehicle.”

It’s reported he recently met with sovereign wealth representatives in the Middle East, later heading to Singapore. The fund could rank among the largest in the world, rivaling the $100 billion Vision Fund run by Japan’s SoftBank, which is dedicated to investing in emerging technologies.

The fund is said to be closely related to the Amazon.com Inc. co-founder’s AI startup, Project Prometheus, of which he is co-founder and co-chief executive, alongside Vik Bajaj, formerly the co-founder of Google LLC’s Verily Life Sciences.

Bezos’ executive position at Project Prometheus marks the first time he has held such a position since he stepped down as Amazon’s boss in 2021. It’s reported that the company now has about 120 employees and has offices in San Francisco, London and Zurich. Late last year, it raised $6.2 billion with a goal to transform the engineering and manufacturing industries with AI and automation.

It reportedly is developing AI systems that can “support the manufacturing of computers, cars and even spacecraft.” It’s not clear what production processes Project Prometheus intends to automate or how.

Bezos believes the world’s major manufacturing industries are on the cusp of profound transformation regarding how fast those industries are going to be automated. “It is going to make their quality go up, and their productivity go up,” he said last year. “I mean by every company, I literally mean every company.”

Photo: Robert Hof/SiliconANGLE