AMD will acquire World Labs, the artificial intelligence startup founded by AI researcher Fei-Fei Li, in an all-stock transaction valued at approximately USD 8.2 billion. The deal will bring World Labs’ research team and spatial intelligence expertise into AMD as the chipmaker expands its AI capabilities beyond hardware.
Under the agreement, Fei-Fei Li will join AMD as executive vice president and chief scientist, reporting to AMD Chair and CEO Lisa Su. The World Labs team will continue its AI model research after the transaction closes.
Li, a prominent AI researcher and computer scientist, founded World Labs to develop models designed to help AI systems understand and interact with the physical world. AMD and World Labs also developed a technical partnership focused on model training and inference optimization using AMD GPUs.
Based in San Francisco, World Labs develops spatial-intelligence models capable of generating, reconstructing and simulating interactive three-dimensional environments using text, image and video inputs. The company also works on technology for robotic learning and simulation.
Its technology targets applications where AI needs to understand physical environments, including robotics, simulation and design. AMD said World Labs’ expertise could provide deeper insight into the evolution of AI workloads as the technology expands into reasoning, robotics, simulation and physical AI.
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The acquisition is expected to close by the end of 2026, subject to regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions. The transaction will be entirely stock-based.
AMD said the acquisition will strengthen its ability to develop hardware, software and systems around emerging AI models and applications. Lisa Su said understanding the evolution of AI models will remain important for building compute platforms for the next generation of AI.
For World Labs, Li said joining AMD would provide the team with the resources and engineering depth needed to accelerate its research and help define infrastructure for the next era of AI.