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

Updated September 28, 2026

Fei‑Fei Li will become AMD’s chief scientist Sep 28

Sep 28

Fei‑Fei Li will become AMD’s chief scientist

Fei-Fei Li says she will join AMD as executive vice president and chief scientist when its acquisition of World Labs is complete. She says she will keep running a frontier research team there, and pledges to make its models and platforms open. That makes the deal more than a chipmaker buying a promising customer: AMD is taking on a model-building lab under its founder’s leadership.

Li says World Labs needs to work closer to hardware to scale its 3D models. The companies began optimizing training and inference on AMD GPUs last year; the acquisition is expected to close by year’s end, subject to regulatory approval.

AMD CEO Lisa Su and World Labs founder Fei-Fei Li signing the deal

The all-stock deal would take AMD from backing a maker of 3D world models to owning it outright.

AMD has agreed to acquire World Labs, the AI startup co-founded by Fei-Fei Li, in an all-stock deal valued at about $8.2 billion.

World Labs makes models that turn images, video and text into persistent, explorable 3D spaces. Its first product, Marble, is available today; the bigger ambition is to use simulated worlds to train robots before they touch real objects. World Labs has shown robots transferring skills learned in simulation to physical tasks, but those results are its own.

This is more than a new customer for AMD chips. AMD invested in World Labs earlier this year and said the companies were already working to run its models on AMD GPUs. Buying the lab brings the model research inside the chipmaker. It is a substantial bet on spatial AI, not evidence yet that the bet will produce reliable real-world robots.

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

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Fei‑Fei Li will become AMD’s chief scientist