AMD agrees to buy Fei-Fei Li's World Labs for $8.2bn

AMD agreed to acquire World Labs, the spatial-intelligence startup led by co-founder and chief executive Fei-Fei Li, for $8.2bn in an all-stock deal. The chipmaker said the transaction is expected to close by the end of 2026, subject to regulatory approval, and that Li will join AMD as executive vice-president and chief scientist, reporting to chair and chief executive Lisa Su.

World Labs builds “world models” that generate, reconstruct and simulate interactive 3D environments from text, image and video, along with technology for robotic learning and simulation; it released its Atlas model less than a month before the deal was announced. Su framed the acquisition as a bet on where AI infrastructure needs are heading: “Building the compute platforms for the next generation of AI requires a deep understanding of how models are evolving. Fei-Fei and the World Labs team bring exceptional research leadership and model expertise.” Li said joining AMD would “give our team the resources and engineering depth to accelerate our research and help define the infrastructure needed for the next era of AI.”

Neither company’s own statement ranked the purchase among AMD’s largest, but CNBC reported it is the chipmaker’s second-largest acquisition on record, behind only the roughly $50bn all-stock purchase of Xilinx completed in 2022; AMD had previously invested in World Labs before agreeing to buy it outright. The deal followed Nvidia’s agreement to acquire Hugging Face earlier the same month, meaning both of the leading AI-chip makers moved within weeks of each other to bring a prominent AI-model or research organisation in-house, rather than simply selling it compute.