World Labs co-founder Fei-Fei Li and AMD chief executive Lisa Su. Image: ITU Pictures, CC BY 2.0 (Li, AI for Good 2017); Fuzheado, CC BY 4.0 (Su, SXSW 2024)
AMD has agreed to buy World Labs, the AI lab founded by Stanford’s Fei-Fei Li, in an all-stock deal worth about $8.2 billion. The chipmaker announced the agreement on Monday, and Li will join AMD as executive vice president and chief scientist, reporting directly to chief executive Lisa Su.
What World Labs does
World Labs, founded in 2024 and based in San Francisco, builds what it calls spatial-intelligence models: AI that can generate, reconstruct and simulate interactive 3D worlds from text, images and video. It also works on technology for training robots in simulation, a field often called physical AI.
Li is one of the best-known names in AI research. She led the ImageNet project, the huge labelled image dataset that helped kick off the deep learning boom in the early 2010s, and co-founded World Labs to take AI beyond text and into the physical world.
Why a chipmaker wants an AI lab
AMD says the deal is about understanding where AI is heading so it can build the right chips. As AI moves into reasoning, robotics, simulation and physical AI, the demands on computing hardware are getting more varied, and World Labs’ model expertise will “help shape its future technology roadmaps”, the company says.
The two already know each other well. World Labs says it began “a deep technical partnership” with AMD last year, training and running its models on AMD’s GPUs, and it became “a natural fit” to combine the two. In its own announcement, World Labs says the combined team plans to build “an end-to-end open AI ecosystem spanning hardware, software, platforms, and widely accessible open models.”
Li explained the move in AMD’s announcement:
Joining AMD will give our team the resources and engineering depth to accelerate our research and help define the infrastructure needed for the next era of AI.
Fei-Fei Li, co-founder and chief executive of World Labs
What happens next
World Labs’ co-founders Justin Johnson and Ben Mildenhall will keep leading the team alongside Li, which will continue to focus on AI model research inside AMD. Because the deal is all-stock, World Labs’ owners will be paid in AMD shares rather than cash. It is expected to close by the end of 2026, subject to regulatory approval and the usual closing conditions.
It lands as AMD rides the AI boom: the company became a $1 trillion company last week after its stock nearly tripled this year. Paying in shares lets it use that valuation to buy a research team of its own, as it tries to close the gap with Nvidia.
Why it matters
Chipmakers are no longer content to sell hardware to AI labs; they want to own the research that tells them what to build next. With one of the field’s most respected researchers as its chief scientist, AMD is betting that the next wave of AI is about robots and 3D worlds, not just chatbots.
Sources: AMD press release (primary), World Labs announcement.
