2 OCT 2026 — AMD is going from investor to owner at World Labs, the AI research company founded by Fei-Fei Li. The chipmaker said on 28 September it will buy the company in an all-stock deal worth about $8.2 billion. Li will become AMD's executive vice president and chief scientist, reporting to its chief executive, Lisa Su.
The deal is expected to close by the end of 2026, subject to regulatory approval, according to AMD's announcement.
What AMD is buying
World Labs was founded in early 2024 by Li, who led the ImageNet image-recognition project, and by the researchers Ben Mildenhall and Justin Johnson. It builds what it calls spatial-intelligence models, which generate, reconstruct and simulate 3D environments from text, images and video, along with tools for training robots in simulation.
Its first commercial product, Marble, launched late last year and makes downloadable 3D worlds from source material, Tom's Hardware reports. Its newest model, Atlas, predicts how a scene looks from a new camera angle using 2D images as input. Li says that solves a long-standing problem in computer vision. Neither company has disclosed World Labs' revenue.
Why a chipmaker wants a model lab
AMD argues that knowing where AI models are heading will help it design the chips, software and systems to run them. "Building the compute platforms for the next generation of AI requires a deep understanding of how models are evolving," Su said. Demands on computing are becoming more varied as AI spreads into robotics and simulation, AMD says, and World Labs' work should inform its technology roadmaps.
In a post explaining the decision, Li wrote that World Labs needed to get "closer to the hardware." She added: "Without having a focused hardware effort, AI is hobbled in efficiency."
A deal between existing partners
The two companies were already close. AMD invested in World Labs' $1 billion funding round in February, alongside Nvidia. At AMD's keynote at CES in January, Li said part of World Labs' model ran on AMD's Instinct accelerators, Tom's Hardware reports. Li writes that the companies began a technical partnership last year on training and running models on AMD GPUs, and describes Su as "an early investor and believer in our mission." Tom's Hardware describes World Labs as one of AMD's showcase customers.
How it compares with AMD's other deals
Only one AMD acquisition has been bigger: the chip designer Xilinx, valued at about $50 billion when that deal closed in 2022. AMD paid $5.4 billion for the graphics chipmaker ATI in 2006 and $4.9 billion for the AI systems maker ZT Systems in 2025, according to Tom's Hardware. World Labs would rank second, well ahead of the rest.
What happens after closing
AMD says the World Labs team will keep working on model research. Mildenhall and Johnson will continue to lead World Labs with Li, Tom's Hardware reports. AMD says the deal will strengthen "the open AI ecosystem," and Li writes that the companies are committed to providing "the best open models and platforms." Neither has said what that will mean for Marble or Atlas.
