AMD Agrees $8.2bn Deal to Buy Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs

AMD has agreed to acquire AI research company World Labs, co-founded and led by Dr Fei-Fei Li, in an all-stock transaction valued at approximately $8.2bn.

The companies announced the definitive agreement on 28 September. It has not yet completed: AMD expects it to close by the end of 2026, subject to regulatory approvals and other customary conditions.

After completion, Li is expected to join AMD as executive vice-president and chief scientist, reporting to chair and chief executive Dr Lisa Su. World Labs co-founders Justin Johnson and Ben Mildenhall are expected to continue leading the team within AMD.

Spatial AI moves inside AMD

World Labs develops what it calls spatial intelligence: models designed to generate, reconstruct and simulate 3D environments, including for robotics and simulation. Its work includes creating interactive 3D worlds from text, images and video, along with outputs such as point clouds and 3D Gaussian splats.

The company’s products include Marble, a multimodal world model, and the World API for developers. More recently, it announced Atlas, an “omni” world model that works with text, images, video and 3D; Atlas is in early access with selected partners.

AMD said the acquisition will help it understand emerging AI workloads and shape future hardware, software and systems for areas including reasoning, robotics, simulation and “physical AI”. “Building the compute platforms for the next generation of AI requires a deep understanding of how models are evolving,” Su said.

World Labs said the companies had already begun a technical partnership focused on training and inference optimisation on AMD GPUs before agreeing the deal.

What happens next

World Labs was founded in 2024 and announced a $1bn funding round in February 2026, with AMD and Nvidia among its named investors. It also acquired robotics company SceniX in July.

For now, the transaction does not bring a new AMD GPU, processor or consumer AI product. AMD has not announced changes to its Radeon, Ryzen or Instinct ranges, nor confirmed whether future consumer products will directly use World Labs technology.