AMD, which makes chips that run AI, has agreed to buy World Labs, the San Francisco AI company that Fei-Fei Li co-founded in 2024 and leads, for about $8.2 billion in AMD shares. AMD says the deal, announced Sept. 28, will help it build hardware and software around the needs of new AI models, as the technology moves into robots and simulation. Li created ImageNet, a huge image database that helped bring about modern AI. Once the deal closes, she will become AMD's chief scientist and an executive vice president, reporting to chief executive Lisa Su.
World Labs builds world models, AI that learns how the world behaves so it can predict what happens next. Its first product, Marble, turns a text description, a photo or a video into a 3D place, such as a kitchen or a house, that people can move through and edit. World Labs says Marble also lets researchers quickly make thousands of realistic scenes to train robots in, work that is slow and expensive to do by hand.
Su said building the computing systems for the next generation of AI "requires a deep understanding of how models are evolving." AMD says AI is spreading into simulation and into physical AI, which senses and acts in the real world through machines such as robots and self-driving cars. It says those uses put more varied demands on the computers running AI, and it expects World Labs' researchers to give it a closer look at how this work is changing. Li said joining AMD will give her team "the resources and engineering depth" to speed up its research.
AMD already knew World Labs well. The two companies began a close technical partnership last year, starting with work to make World Labs' models train and run efficiently on AMD's AI chips, and AMD invested in World Labs' $1 billion funding round in February. NVIDIA, AMD's rival in AI chips, is also among World Labs' investors. It offers its own world models, called Cosmos, which it says developers can use to simulate the physical world and generate data for robots and self-driving cars.
The price would make this AMD's second-largest acquisition, behind the roughly $50 billion it paid for Xilinx in 2022, according to a news report. The number of AMD shares that World Labs' shareholders will receive is not fixed yet. AMD's filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission says it will depend on AMD's average share price over the 10 trading days that end two trading days before the deal closes. The companies expect to close by the end of 2026, once regulators approve the deal and other usual conditions are met.
After the deal closes, the World Labs team will keep working on AI research inside AMD, with co-founders Justin Johnson and Ben Mildenhall helping Li lead it. Neither company has said how many people work at World Labs, or what the deal means for Marble, which is still available.