AMD has announced a definitive agreement to acquire World Labs, the AI model and research lab led by Fei-Fei Li, in an all-stock transaction valued at approximately $8.2 billion.
The chipmaker said the acquisition is intended to deepen its AI capabilities by adding World Labs’ researchers and model expertise to its work on AI hardware, software and systems. In its announcement, AMD said expanding demand in areas such as reasoning, robotics, simulation and physical AI is increasing the variety of compute infrastructure those systems need, and that World Labs’ model-development experience will help inform AMD’s future technology roadmaps.
What World Labs brings to AMD
AMD described World Labs as an AI model and research lab. The company said World Labs’ expertise in developing advanced models will give AMD deeper insight into how AI workloads are changing as it pursues a broader AI infrastructure strategy.
AMD also said World Labs is headquartered in San Francisco and develops spatial-intelligence models that generate, reconstruct and simulate interactive 3D environments from text, image and video inputs, alongside technology for robotic learning and simulation.
World Labs separately said it is joining AMD and framed the move as a way to expand its work. The lab said accelerating spatial and physical intelligence requires scaling its efforts, extending its reach and moving closer to hardware.
Fei-Fei Li’s role after closing
AMD said that after the transaction closes, the World Labs team will continue focusing on AI model research. Fei-Fei Li is set to join AMD as executive vice president and chief scientist, reporting to Lisa Su, according to AMD’s announcement.
The company said the deal is expected to close by the end of 2026, subject to regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions.
