World Labs

AI · Semiconductors · Spatial Intelligence

Acquisition

AMD to acquire Fei-Fei Li's World Labs for $8.2B in all-stock deal

The chipmaker is buying frontier AI research directly to shape how it designs future silicon.

• AMD entered a definitive agreement to acquire spatial-AI startup World Labs in an all-stock deal valued at approximately $8.2 billion, expected to close by the end of 2026.
• San Francisco-based World Labs, founded in 2024 by Stanford professor Fei-Fei Li, builds spatial-intelligence models that generate, reconstruct and simulate interactive 3D environments from text, image and video inputs.
• Li will join AMD as executive vice president and chief scientist, reporting directly to CEO Lisa Su, while the World Labs team continues its research inside AMD.
• World Labs raised $1 billion in a funding round earlier this year and had already been running a technical partnership with AMD on GPU training and inference optimization since last year.
• The number of AMD shares issued to World Labs stockholders will be based on AMD's daily volume-weighted average stock price over the 10 trading days ending two days before closing.
• AMD frames the deal as a way to compete with Nvidia, which already ships open-weight world models like Cosmos, while AMD had so far only offered text- and video-based models publicly.
• The acquisition signals that chipmakers see owning frontier AI model research, not just supplying compute for it, as key to designing hardware for emerging workloads like robotics and physical-world simulation.