AMD agrees to buy Fei-Fei Li's World Labs for about $8.2 billion in stock

AMD announced on 28 September that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire World Labs, the San Francisco AI model and research lab led by Fei-Fei Li.

What AMD says

The deal is all-stock and valued at approximately $8.2 billion. AMD expects it to close by the end of 2026, subject to regulatory approvals and other customary conditions.

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.

AMD's stated reason is its own roadmap rather than a model product. It says World Labs' model work will give it "deeper insight into how workloads are evolving" as AI moves into reasoning, robotics, simulation and physical AI, and will help shape its future hardware, software and systems.

"Building the compute platforms for the next generation of AI requires a deep understanding of how models are evolving," said Lisa Su, AMD's chair and CEO.

What changes after close

The World Labs team will keep working on AI model research. Li will join AMD as executive vice president and chief scientist, reporting to Su.

"Joining AMD will give our team the resources and engineering depth to accelerate our research," Li said.

The release does not say whether World Labs' existing products stay on sale, or what the deal means for its customers. It frames the purchase as part of AMD's strategy to deliver AI infrastructure for an "open ecosystem".