Jeff Bezos puts millions into British AI startup hunting for next-gen chip materials

Jeff Bezos has placed a hefty bet on CuspAI, a London-based startup that just raised $450 million and announced a major tie-up with Nvidia. The company is on a mission to speed up the discovery of new materials for semiconductors, clean energy and advanced manufacturing. The funding round, which values CuspAI at $2.6 billion, was led by Kleiner Perkins and NEA, with Bezos Expeditions chipping in alongside AMD Ventures, Lux Capital and Britain's new Sovereign AI Venture Fund.

CuspAI builds artificial intelligence that simulates how novel materials will perform, cutting down the endless list of possibilities scientists have to test in the lab. Josh Coyne, a partner at Kleiner Perkins, put it bluntly: "Most big leaps in technology come down to a material, and the next set, from cheaper carbon capture to semiconductors and cleaner water, is stuck waiting on materials nobody has discovered yet. CuspAI built a search engine that changes that." The startup is part of a wave of companies trying to bring AI into the physical world, not just the digital one. Bezos has his own play in this space too: his company Prometheus, launched in 2025, is already valued at $41 billion and focuses on AI for invention and engineering.

CuspAI is expanding fast, opening a new office in Singapore and growing teams across the U.K., the Netherlands, Germany, Japan and the U.S. The company also launched what it calls an AI Materials Foundry, a network that combines data, labs, computing power and scientific know-how. Nvidia is one of 45 organizations providing the compute backbone for the platform. Meta's Fundamental AI Research Team is also on board. Chad Edwards, CuspAI's CEO and cofounder, said: "As AI transforms the physical world, new materials will open up new frontiers across semiconductors, energy and advanced manufacturing."