Amd To Acquire World Labs In $8.2 Billion AI Deal
The planned acquisition would bring Fei-Fei Li to AMD as chief scientist and give the chipmaker closer ties to research on AI models of the physical world.
AMD announced an agreement to acquire AI research company World Labs for approximately $8.2 billion. According to The Verge, the transaction is an all-stock deal. World Labs co-founder and CEO Fei-Fei Li will join AMD as executive vice president and chief scientist, bringing research on models of the physical world closer to the chipmaker’s hardware and software development.
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The deal and Li’s new role
Both The Verge and TechCrunch report that the companies expect the acquisition to close by the end of 2026. TechCrunch adds that the deal is subject to regulatory approval. Li will report to AMD CEO Lisa Su, according to The Verge, which says the World Labs team will continue its AI model research.
AMD says the acquisition will help it design hardware, software and systems around emerging AI models and applications, The Verge reports. TechCrunch describes the companies’ rationale more specifically: World Labs sees a need for closer collaboration between model researchers and computing-system developers, while AMD expects insights from advanced AI workloads to inform its chip roadmap.
What World Labs brings to AMD
Li founded World Labs in 2024 to develop models that can understand and reason about the physical world, according to TechCrunch. The outlet identifies her as a Stanford computer science professor known for her work in computer vision, including the ImageNet database. The Verge reports that World Labs reached a $1 billion valuation within months of launching.
World Labs introduced its first commercial product, Marble, in 2025, according to The Verge. It allows users to generate interactive 3D worlds from prompts. TechCrunch says the company presents Marble as a tool for entertainment experiences and for building simulated environments that could be used to train robots.
The companies were already working together before the acquisition. TechCrunch reports that AMD and World Labs formed a partnership last year focused on inference optimization and training, and that Li appeared at AMD’s CES presentation earlier this year. Li has described joining AMD as a way for World Labs to expand the reach of its research and work more closely with hardware, according to TechCrunch.
A broader AI platform strategy
TechCrunch says the purchase could help AMD compete with Nvidia’s ecosystem of AI-specific chips. The outlet notes that Nvidia has made open-weight world models available, while AMD’s publicly offered models have been limited to text and video. It also describes world models as potentially important for generating simulated training data for robots when useful real-world data is scarce.
That is a potential application, not an announced outcome of the acquisition. For now, AMD’s stated aim, as reported by The Verge, is to use World Labs’ model expertise to guide the development of its future AI computing platforms.
Sources
This story was compiled by AI from the reports below. Read the originals for the full details.