AMD Buys Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs for $8.2 Billion

AMD is putting one of AI’s better-known names inside the company. It has agreed to buy World Labs, the San Francisco startup founded by Fei-Fei Li, in an all-stock deal worth about $8.2 billion. The deal still needs regulatory approval and is expected to close by the end of the year. When it does, Li will become AMD’s executive vice president and chief scientist, reporting to CEO Lisa Su.

World Labs is not a chatbot shop. It builds so-called world models, which can create, rebuild and simulate 3D environments from text, images or video. The company also works on systems for training and simulating robots. Li describes the goal as “spatial intelligence”: AI that understands the physical world and can act in it, not just guess the next word.

The startup is young, but it has already put out real products. Its first public release was Marble, a multimodal world model that turns a photo, a set of images, a video or a text prompt into explorable 3D worlds. Users can edit those worlds and export them as Gaussian splats or 3D meshes. A few weeks ago, World Labs followed that with Atlas, an “omni world model” that takes text, images, video and 3D data in one system and can generate videos of up to one minute in 1440p with precise camera control. Atlas is still in early access for select partners, and it is meant to feed future versions of Marble.

AMD was already in the room before the acquisition. It joined World Labs’ first financing round in 2024, when the startup raised about $230 million from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Intel and Nvidia. In February, AMD came back for the larger $1 billion round alongside Nvidia, Autodesk, Emerson Collective, Fidelity and Sea. Media reports had put World Labs at around a $5 billion valuation then, so the new price tag implies a jump of more than 60 percent in only a few months. That also means Nvidia, AMD’s biggest rival, helped fund the startup AMD is now taking in-house.

AMD says the deal is about the next phase of AI, where systems move beyond chatbots into reasoning, robotics, simulation and physical AI. That shift needs more varied compute infrastructure, and AMD wants World Labs’ research to help shape future hardware roadmaps. It also fits AMD’s pitch that it is building for an open ecosystem, which is a fairly obvious swipe at Nvidia’s CUDA world. For AMD, this is less a trophy buy than a way to learn what the next generation of models will demand before somebody else’s chips get there first.