Nvidia and Meta have joined a Bezos-backed alliance to develop materials for chips

British startup CuspAI, in which billionaire and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has invested, has launched AI Materials Foundry—an alliance of some 50 companies, including two members of the “Magnificent Seven.” The project’s participants intend to pool their computing power and scientific resources to accelerate and reduce the cost of developing materials for chip manufacturing and other industries.

On July 20, CuspAI announced the launch of the AI Materials Foundry alliance. Among the alliance’s members are Nvidia and Meta. AMD and Samsung are also among the founding partners.

In addition, the startup officially announced the completion of its Series B funding round, in which it raised $450 million. The round was led by venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins and NEA, and Jeff Bezos’s family office, Bezos Expeditions, made a “significant contribution” to the funding, the company noted, without disclosing specific amounts.

Investors have valued CuspAI at $2.6 billion, up from $520 million in September 2025, according to Bloomberg. In less than a year, the startup's valuation has increased fivefold.

Initially, CuspAI focused on sourcing materials for carbon dioxide capture and water purification. Over the past year, the startup has shifted its focus to the semiconductor industry due to high demand from manufacturers of AI chips and their suppliers, who are “frantically searching for new materials,” said CuspAI co-founder and CEO Chad Edwards. According to him, by 2026, the startup will devote 80% of its efforts to finding such materials.

CuspAI uses a reverse-engineering approach: researchers specify the desired properties of a material, after which algorithms propose options for its chemical structure and use computer simulations to evaluate their characteristics and feasibility of synthesis, the Financial Times reported

This approach helps reduce the number of variants that must then be synthesized and tested in the lab. However, CuspAI has already learned from experience that the results of computer modeling cannot always be replicated in practice, according to Bloomberg.

In one of its projects, CuspAI attempted to identify materials for carbon dioxide capture. Out of 300 trillion possible organometallic framework structures—compounds consisting of a metal atom surrounded by carbon-based molecular chains—the neural network selected ten substances. Only some of them could be synthesized, and none of them outperformed materials already available on the market. “They weren’t cutting-edge,” Edwards admitted (as quoted by Bloomberg).

Despite its star-studded roster of partners and investors, none of CuspAI's projects has yet made it out of the lab, Bloomberg reports.

Bezos is also a co-founder and co-CEO of the startup Prometheus, which has raised $12 billion at a valuation of $41 billion. The company aims to create a universal AI engineer capable of reducing design and production times. According to the FT, Bezos’ investment in CuspAI was made personally and is not related to his role at Prometheus.

Startups led by former OpenAI and Google DeepMind employees are also working on the search for new materials. DeepMind itself has announced that it will soon begin its own work on applying AI to materials science, according to Bloomberg.

This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor