AMD agrees to buy Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs for $8.2bn in stock

AMD has agreed to buy World Labs, the AI model startup led by Fei-Fei Li, in an all-stock deal valued at about $8.2bn. AMD announced the deal on Monday. Li will join AMD as executive vice president and chief scientist, reporting to CEO Lisa Su.

AMD expects the deal to close by the end of 2026, subject to regulatory approvals. After it closes, the World Labs team will keep working on AI model research, AMD said. Co-founders Justin Johnson and Ben Mildenhall will keep leading that team with Li, World Labs said.

“Without having a focused hardware effort, AI is hobbled in efficiency. And scale,” Li wrote in a post about the deal.

What World Labs builds

World Labs has its headquarters in San Francisco. Its spatial intelligence models generate, rebuild and simulate interactive 3D environments from text, images and video. It also builds technology for robot learning and simulation. Its product Marble creates 3D worlds from images, video or text. Its newest model, Atlas, predicts new camera views from 2D images, Li wrote.

Li founded World Labs at the start of 2024 with Johnson and Mildenhall, and is its CEO. Her lab’s early work produced the ImageNet dataset, and she was the founding director of Stanford’s Human-Centered AI institute. Other companies are also building world models, AI systems that learn how the physical world works.

World Labs raised $1bn in February. Its funding announcement named AMD and Nvidia among its investors, along with Autodesk, Emerson Collective, Fidelity and Sea.

Why AMD wants it

AI is moving into reasoning, robotics, simulation and physical AI, and that puts new demands on computing, AMD said. It said World Labs’ model expertise will show it how AI workloads are changing and help shape its future technology roadmaps.

“Building the compute platforms for the next generation of AI requires a deep understanding of how models are evolving,” Su said.

Li wrote that Su was an early investor in World Labs. The two companies began a technical partnership last year, starting with model training and inference work on AMD GPUs, she wrote.

“The universe isn’t made up of words; it’s made of real things,” Li wrote.

In August, AMD bought Taalas, a startup that etches AI models into silicon. In July, it said it would invest $5bn in Anthropic.