Jeff Bezos's secretive new AI lab is moving in next door to Google DeepMind. Project Prometheus, the physical-AI startup Bezos co-founded in November 2025, is in talks to take office space in London's King's Cross district, according to Financial Times reporting picked up across the wires this weekend. The expansion comes only days after the company reportedly locked in roughly $10 billion in fresh funding at a valuation near $38 billion.
The King's Cross signal is hard to miss. The same few blocks already house Google DeepMind's headquarters on Handyside Street and Google's broader UK research footprint at the newly named "Platform 37" building. By planting a flag there, Prometheus is positioning itself directly inside the deepest concentration of frontier AI talent in Europe.
A physical-AI lab with deep pockets
Project Prometheus is run by Bezos alongside co-CEO Vik Bajaj, a chemist and physicist who previously worked at Google X. Unlike chatbot-focused labs, Prometheus is building AI systems designed to model the laws of physics and apply them to industry, engineering, and manufacturing — what the company and its backers call "physical AI."
The latest funding round, first reported by the Financial Times and confirmed by Bloomberg earlier this week, includes participation from JPMorgan Chase and BlackRock. At $38 billion, Prometheus would already rank among the most valuable AI startups in the world despite having existed for only about six months.
The company is headquartered in San Francisco and, prior to this week's reporting, was already known to maintain offices in London and Zurich. The King's Cross talks suggest Prometheus is moving from a small UK toehold to a meaningful European base.
Why London, and why now
The UK has spent the past year aggressively courting frontier AI labs. Earlier in April, the British government opened separate dialogues with Anthropic about a possible London dual listing, and DeepMind continues to expand at King's Cross. Add Bezos's lab into that mix and the geography of European AI is increasingly clustered inside a single postcode.
For Prometheus, the location offers practical advantages: proximity to DeepMind's alumni network, easier recruiting from Oxbridge and Imperial, and a regulatory regime that has positioned itself as more permissive than the EU's AI Act. As of December 2025 the lab had reportedly hired more than 120 staff, including researchers poached from Meta, OpenAI, and DeepMind itself — exactly the talent pool that lives in this corner of London.
The takeaway
Project Prometheus has gone from "secretive Bezos side project" to a $38 billion player with a London expansion and a physical-AI thesis in less than half a year. The King's Cross move plants it inside DeepMind's gravity well — and signals that the next phase of the AI race may be fought as much over factories, robots, and materials as over chatbots.
