AMD Acquires World Labs for $8.2 Bn, Fei-Fei Li to Join as Chief Scientist

AMD has agreed to acquire AI research company World Labs in an all-stock transaction valued at approximately $8.2 billion, bringing AI researcher Fei-Fei Li into AMD as Executive Vice President and Chief Scientist.

The transaction is expected to close by the end of 2026, subject to regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions. Li will report directly to AMD CEO Lisa Su, while World Labs co-founders Justin Johnson and Ben Mildenhall will continue leading the team within AMD.

The deal gives AMD access to World Labs’ research in spatial intelligence and world models that will help understand, generate, and simulate three-dimensional environments.

AMD said the technology will help it better understand how AI workloads are evolving across areas including reasoning, robotics, simulation, and physical AI.

“Building the compute platforms for the next generation of AI requires a deep understanding of how models are evolving,” Su said in a statement. 

“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.”

The acquisition follows a technical partnership between the two companies that began last year. World Labs said the work initially centred on training and inference optimisation on AMD GPUs.

“As our teams worked together, we realised it would be a natural fit to bring together our AI ecosystem of software and hardware, foundation models, and applications,” World Labs said.

Li said the move will take World Labs closer to the hardware needed to scale its research.

“Without having a focused hardware effort, AI is hobbled in efficiency. And scale. And for our purposes, remains trapped in the digital world,” Li wrote in a post on X.

World Labs was founded in 2024 by Li, Johnson, Mildenhall, and Christoph Lassner. The company emerged from stealth in September 2024 with $230 million in funding and has since built models focused on spatial and physical intelligence.

In February, World Labs raised another $1 billion from investors including AMD, Nvidia, Autodesk, Emerson Collective, Fidelity Management & Research Company, and Sea. Autodesk invested $200 million in the round. 

The company did not disclose its valuation, although Bloomberg had earlier reported that World Labs was deliberating another fundraise at a valuation of about $5 billion. 

World Labs’ first product, Marble, uses its 3D world models to generate persistent and spatially coherent environments from images, video, text, and 3D layouts. The company says it is developing its models for applications spanning robotics, scientific discovery, creativity, and virtual worlds.

The acquisition also adds to AMD’s push to build an AI stack spanning chips, software, systems and models.

AMD acquired Finnish AI lab Silo AI for $665 million in 2024, with the company’s researchers working on AI models and software for AMD hardware. It also completed its $4.4 billion acquisition of ZT Systems in March 2025, adding expertise in AI infrastructure and rack-scale systems.

The World Labs deal takes that strategy further into model research. AMD said the company’s expertise will give it insight into emerging AI workloads and help shape future hardware, software, and systems.

Li will lead the research organisation alongside Johnson and Mildenhall after the transaction closes. The combined teams will work towards what the companies describe as an open AI ecosystem covering hardware, software, platforms, foundation models, and applications.