AMD to Acquire Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs in $8.2 Billion Deal
AMD has agreed to purchase AI research startup World Labs for roughly $8.2 billion in stock, bringing co-founder Fei-Fei Li aboard as the chipmaker's chief scientist.
AMD Makes Multi-Billion Dollar Move for World Labs
AMD announced plans to acquire AI research company World Labs in an all-stock transaction valued at roughly $8.2 billion. As part of the agreement, World Labs co-founder and chief executive Dr. Fei-Fei Li will join AMD as executive vice president and chief scientist, reporting directly to AMD CEO Lisa Su. The transaction is slated to close before the end of the year.
Integrating Spatial AI Into AMD’s Hardware Roadmap
Founded in 2024, World Labs achieved a $1 billion valuation just months after launching. The company focuses on developing AI models capable of understanding and generating spatial environments. In 2025, the startup released Marble, its debut commercial product, which generates interactive 3D worlds from user text prompts.
Following the buyout, the World Labs team will remain dedicated to advancing AI model research. AMD plans to leverage the startup’s research expertise to co-design AI hardware, software, and full systems tailored to the computational requirements of next-generation model architectures.
Writing on Substack, Li framed the acquisition as an evolution of her startup’s goals: “Just like I knew it was time to do a startup to jumpstart the work of creating foundation models beyond LLMs and achieve the most impact in AI, it’s again very clear that the right path for myself and World Labs is to continue our mission as a part of AMD,” adding that the combined teams intend to push frontiers “openly with the community and the entire ecosystem.”
Su emphasized the feedback loop between algorithm design and silicon: “Building the compute platforms for the next generation of AI requires a deep understanding of how models are evolving,” Su stated. “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.”
Chipmakers Consolidate the AI Ecosystem
The multibillion-dollar transaction highlights an intensifying push by semiconductor giants to bring proprietary AI research and software ecosystems under their own roofs. The move directly follows rival chipmaker Nvidia's announcement earlier this month that it is acquiring open-source AI platform Hugging Face in a deal valued at nearly $13 billion.
