AMD acquires AI legend Fei-Fei Li's World Labs for $8.2 billion

AMD has agreed to acquire AI model research firm World Labs in an all-stock purchase worth around $8.2 billion. World Labs co-founder Fei-Fei Li will join AMD as executive vice president and chief scientist, reporting to CEO Lisa Su. The deal will be finalized once it passes the usual regulatory hurdles.

Su says building compute platforms for the next generation of AI requires “a deep understanding of how models are evolving,” and Li says advancing the technology “requires close collaboration across model research, systems and compute,” and wrote in a separate post that World Labs needs to get “closer to the hardware,” without which AI is “hobbled in efficiency.”

Before founding World Labs, Li had already established herself as a luminary in AI research and development. She led the vital ImageNet project in the 2010s and has served as the chief scientist of AI and machine learning at Google Cloud and the director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Thanks to her many contributions to the field, she has been dubbed the "Godmother of AI" by several institutions.

World Labs develops “spatial-intelligence models that generate, reconstruct and simulate interactive 3D environments,” which are useful in robotics and simulation applications. Its world models build or simulate 3D scenes rather than being text-focused like LLMs. The company’s first commercial product was Marble, launched late last year, which creates persistent, downloadable 3D worlds from source material.

AMD and World Labs had already been working together to optimize training and inference for its models, and AMD had invested in World Labs’ $1 billion funding round in February. During Su’s keynote at CES in January, Li said that part of World Labs’ model ran on AMD's Instinct accelerators, and her team used both Instinct hardware and the ROCm software stack to achieve performance improvements for their applications. This tuning experience positioned World Labs as one of AMD’s showcase customers, and AMD says the deal will “help shape its future technology roadmaps.”

World Labs is AMD’s second-largest deal after FPGA designer Xilinx, which came out to about $50 billion at the close in 2022. AMD's other big buys have been smaller: ATI for $5.4 billion in 2006, AI systems designer ZT Systems for $4.9 billion in 2025, and networking solutions developer Pensando for $1.9 billion in 2022.

AI titan Nvidia was also an investor in World Labs in the round earlier this year. However, Nvidia has already been developing Cosmos, its own family of open-source world models. It agreed to buy Hugging Face, a platform for hosting and distributing open models, earlier this month for $12.93 billion.

World Labs' team will continue to do model research. The companies say that the deal will strengthen an “open AI ecosystem,” per the release, and World Labs said in its own post that it remains committed to “widely accessible open models.”

Atlas, World Labs’ latest world model, will power future versions of its Marble product, the company says. Li’s co-founders Justin Johnson and Ben Mildenhall will continue to work with Li in leading World Labs, including after Li takes on the new role at AMD after the expected close of the transaction by the end of the year.

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