# Bezos AI Fund, Amazon Smartphone, Space Data Centers

**Podcast:** TechCrunch Daily Crunch
**Published:** 2026-03-21

## Transcript

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Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin enters the Space Data Center game.
I'm Imran Shake, and your Friday Daily Crunch, featuring three big tech headlines, starts right now.
Amazon's Jeff Bezos is reportedly seeking 100 billion dollars for a new fund, the likes of which will be used to buy up companies in major industrial sectors and ultimately modernize and automate them with AI, according to sources cited by the Wall Street Journal.
Now the efforts related to Bezos' AI startup project, Prometheus.
Bezos, whose involvement with the company was originally reported all the way back in November, is serving as co-founder and co-CEO alongside former Google executive Vic Bajaj.
Prometheus, which launched with $6.2 billion in funding, is focused on creating high-level AI models to improve manufacturing and engineering in aerospace, automotive, and other sectors.
The new manufacturing fund will support that mission by buying up companies that will ultimately use Prometheus's models.
Now, according to the Wall Street Journal, Bezos has recently traveled to Singapore and the Middle East in his mission to raise funds for the effort.
The plan is to acquire companies in areas like aerospace, chipmaking, and defense.
TechCrunch reached out to Bezos via Amazon's getting back into the smartphone game, folks.
More than 11 years after the e-commerce giant pulled the plug on its failed first effort, the Firephone, remember that?
What a certain fire that was indeed.
The company's now developing a new smartphone codenamed Transformer, Reuters reported, citing anonymous sources.
The device is being developed by the company's devices and services division, and it would feature personalized features that would make it easier to use Amazon's suite of apps, including Amazon Shopping, Prime Video, and Prime Music, the report said.
The smartphone would, of course, also support Alexa, the smart home assistant that Amazon has been investing heavily in, adding AI chops and expanding support to work with most of the company's devices.
AI features are said to be a big focus for the smartphone, if you can't tell, which is being seen internally as a way to encourage Amazon customers to use its AI products, Reuters reported.
The smartphone's said to be developed by a relatively new unit within the devices division called Zero One, which is led by Jay Allard, a name that might sound familiar because he's the former Microsoft executive who helped create the Xbox.
Now the news comes as Amazon has been going all in on AI, investing $50 billion into OpenAI recently, and projecting $200 billion in capital expenditures toward its AI chips and robotic efforts in 2026.
We're gonna jump back to Jeff Bezos for this one, because Blue Origin, the space conglomerate founded by the Amazon chair, has asked the U.S.
government for permissions to launch a network of more than, get this, 50,000 satellites that'll act as a data center in orbit.
In a March 19th document filed with the Federal Communications Commission, Blue Origins attorney described Project Sunrise as a network of spacecraft that will perform advanced computation in orbit to ease mounting pressure on U.S.
communities and natural resources by shifting energy and water-intensive compute away from terrestrial data centers.
Blue Origins filing.
It did not describe its plans for the satellites in detail, so it's hard to know how much computing power the company is aiming to generate in space.
It does note that Blue Origin plans to use another satellite constellation it's seeking to build called TerraWave, has a high throughput communications backbone for the data satellites.
Shifting massive compute to space is, well, attractive because of, well, that giant gas ball in the sky called the Sun and its free solar energy to be harvested.
And once in orbit, there are fewer regulations restricting corporate activities.
Entrepreneurs behind these projects envision a future where AI tools are widespread and imagine that much of the inference work behind them will be outsourced to orbit.
Several companies are already pursuing the idea.
SpaceX has filed for permission to launch a million satellites to be used as a distributed data center, while the startup StarCloud has proposed a network of, you know, just a mere 60,000 spacecraft to the FCC.
Google, no slouch, is also developing a concept for a space data center called Project Suncatcher, which we'll see its partner Planet Labs launch two demo spacecraft next year.
And rounding out our Friday Amazon special, a little startup news.
Amazon has just acquired River, which is a maker of a stair climbing delivery robot.
Now, River is a Zurich-based autonomous robotic startup.
Now, River has been acquired by Amazon in a deal that signals the e commerce giant's interest in doorstep delivery.
Terms of the deal weren't disclosed.
Co-founder and CEO Marco Bielonik, who once described the four-legged wheeled robot to TechCrunch as a dog on roller skates, shared the acquisition news on LinkedIn.
The information was first to report the deal.
Bilonic said in his LinkedIn post that the acquisition will accelerate our vision of building general physical AI through doorstep delivery, bringing robotics and AI closer to real-world deployment at scale.
Meaning, in plain terms, that Amazon's vast resources should help River get its robots onto more doorsteps faster.
Last year, River launched a pilot program in Austin with VIHO, a package delivery company.
Bulanic said at the time he hoped to learn from the partnership with VIHO and eventually scale to 100 bots by 2026.
It's unclear if the company was ever able to reach that milestone.
River, you see, got the attention of Amazon long before its pilot program.
The Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund and Bezos Expeditions invested in River as part of a twenty-two point two million dollar seed round that closed in 2024.
The startup, which had raised a total of $25 million dollars, was last valued at $100 million.
And that's your daily crunch.
Today's stories were reported by Ram Eyer, Kirsten Korosek, Tim Fernholtz, Lucas Ropek, and more awesome Tech Runch journalists.
We'll see you here next week.
And until then, find us at TechRunch.com.
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