AMD buys Fei-Fei Li's World Labs for $8.2 billion

AMD will acquire World Labs, the San Francisco spatial-intelligence lab led by Fei-Fei Li, in an all-stock transaction valued at approximately $8.2 billion, the chipmaker said on September 28.

The agreement covers all equity interests in World Labs Technologies Inc, according to AMD's 8-K filing, which dates the merger agreement to September 26. AMD is not paying cash and will not know the share count until closing: the filing says the number of shares will be calculated from the daily volume-weighted average price of AMD common stock over the ten trading days ending two trading days before the deal closes. AMD expects it to close by the end of 2026, subject to regulatory approvals.

Li joins AMD as executive vice president and chief scientist, reporting to chief executive Lisa Su. Justin Johnson and Ben Mildenhall will keep leading the World Labs team as it moves into AMD, the lab said in its own post.

"Building the compute platforms for the next generation of AI requires a deep understanding of how models are evolving," Su said in the release. Li framed it as a question of scale: "Advancing the next generation of AI technology requires close collaboration across model research, systems and compute."

World Labs was founded in 2024 and raised $230 million that September to launch. It raised $1 billion earlier this year in a round that included AMD's own money, Reuters reported. Its first product, Marble, generates and simulates interactive 3D environments from text, image and video inputs, and the lab also builds for robotic learning and simulation. SLOP TV covered Atlas, its camera-view prediction model, in September.

The purchase is a bet on the part of AI that reads video and reconstructs the space inside it. TechCrunch notes that Nvidia already publishes open-weight world models including Cosmos, while AMD's public models have been text and video generators rather than spatial ones. AMD says understanding frontier workloads will shape its chip roadmap.

For creators, the open question is what stays open. World Labs has described an "end-to-end open AI ecosystem" and widely accessible models as the plan after the sale, and Marble's scene generation runs on compute AMD sells. Neither company has said whether existing products, licences or prices change, and the answer is likely to arrive with the close rather than before it.

Regulatory clearance is the next step; AMD expects the transaction to close by the end of 2026.