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

answer: AMD is acquiring World Labs for $8.2 billion in stock, closing by end of 2026.

takeaways:

AMD said on Monday 28 September 2026 that it will acquire World Labs, the San Francisco AI lab founded by Fei-Fei Li, for $8.2 billion in stock. AMD said the deal is expected to close by the end of 2026, subject to regulatory approval.

The acquisition is AMD's second-largest, behind its roughly $50 billion purchase of Xilinx in 2022, according to CNBC.

World Labs builds spatial-intelligence models that generate, reconstruct and simulate interactive 3D environments from text, images and video, along with technology for robot learning and simulation. Its first product, Marble, builds 3D worlds from a small number of images and is used in entertainment and to create simulated environments for training robots.

Li, a Stanford computer science professor known for creating ImageNet, founded World Labs in 2024. AMD was already an investor in the company. She argues that general intelligence needs grounding in physics rather than text alone.

On closing, Li will join AMD as executive vice president and chief scientist, reporting to chair and chief executive Lisa Su. The World Labs team will continue its model research at AMD.

Su said building compute platforms for the next generation of AI requires a deep understanding of how models are evolving.

"To do this requires scaling our efforts, widening our reach, and getting closer to the hardware," Li said.

AMD is pursuing the deal as AI expands into reasoning, robotics and physical applications, and as it competes with Nvidia, which already offers open world models such as Cosmos, according to TechCrunch. AMD and Nvidia began a training and inference-optimisation partnership on AMD GPUs last year, according to CNBC. The deal now awaits regulatory approval before closing.