AMD has agreed to acquire World Labs in an all-stock transaction valued at approximately $8.2 billion, adding the AI research company founded and led by AI researcher Dr. Fei-Fei Li to AMD’s growing artificial intelligence business. The transaction is expected to close by the end of 2026, subject to regulatory approvals and customary closing conditions.
The acquisition will bring World Labs’ team of AI researchers and model experts into AMD, with the chipmaker aiming to more closely connect AI model research with the development of hardware, software, and computing systems.
AMD said AI workloads are increasingly expanding beyond traditional generative AI to include reasoning, robotics, simulation, and physical AI, creating new requirements for compute infrastructure. World Labs’ model-development expertise is expected to provide AMD with additional insight into emerging workload requirements and influence its future technology roadmaps.
San Francisco-based World Labs develops spatial-intelligence models capable of generating, reconstructing, and simulating interactive 3D environments from text, images, and video. Its technology also supports robotic learning and simulation.
The acquisition expands AMD’s capabilities beyond the underlying processors and systems that run AI workloads by bringing AI model-development expertise directly into the company. AMD said the combination should help it design future computing infrastructure around the evolving requirements of advanced AI models.
Following completion of the transaction, the World Labs team will continue focusing on AI model research. Dr. Fei-Fei Li will join AMD as Executive Vice President and Chief Scientist, reporting directly to AMD Chair and CEO Dr. Lisa Su.
AMD is positioning the acquisition as part of its strategy to build an open AI ecosystem spanning CPUs, GPUs, networking, software, and other infrastructure technologies. By adding World Labs’ model research capabilities, AMD expects to gain a deeper understanding of how next-generation AI applications will use computing resources.
The combination could be particularly relevant as spatial intelligence and physical AI increasingly connect AI models with robotics, simulation, and interactive digital environments, areas that can require substantially different compute architectures and workloads than conventional language models.
KEY QUOTES:
“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. Together, we can use that insight to develop the hardware, software and systems that will power the next generation of AI and strengthen the open AI ecosystem.”
Dr. Lisa Su, Chair and CEO of AMD
“Advancing the next generation of AI technology requires close collaboration across model research, systems and compute. Joining AMD will give our team the resources and engineering depth to accelerate our research and help define the infrastructure needed for the next era of AI.”
Dr. Fei-Fei Li, Co-Founder and CEO of World Labs
