The AMD closed a deal to acquire World Labs, the artificial intelligence startup founded by Fei-Fei Li, in a transaction of approximately US$ 8.2 billion in stock. Announced on Monday (28), the deal brings a team specialized in models capable of understanding and simulating three-dimensional environments into the chip manufacturer.
World Labs develops systems of spatial intelligence, an AI approach aimed at representing and reasoning about the physical world. Its models can generate, reconstruct and simulate interactive 3D environments from text, images and videos, in addition to being applied to robot training and other forms of simulation.
For AMD, the acquisition expands its reach beyond supplying computing infrastructure. The company intends to use World Labs' research to understand how new AI workloads are evolving and guide the future development of chips, software and systems for applications such as robotics, simulation and physical AI.
The rapprochement between the two companies was already underway. According to Fei-Fei Li, World Labs began a technical partnership with AMD last year to optimize training and inference of models on the manufacturer's GPUs. AMD also participated in the US$ 1 billion funding round raised by the startup in February.
Fei-Fei Li will be AMD's chief scientist
Upon completion of the deal, Li will take on the roles of executive vice president and chief scientist at AMD, reporting directly to CEO Lisa Su. The World Labs team will remain dedicated to the research and development of AI models within the company.
Li is one of the best-known researchers in computer vision and was responsible for creating ImageNet, a database that played an important role in the advancement of deep learning. At World Labs, founded in 2024, her research came to focus on systems capable of developing a representation of space and the physical relationships between objects.
The startup raised US$ 1 billion earlier this year in a round that included AMD, Nvidia, Autodesk, Fidelity, Emerson Collective and Sea. At the time, World Labs said it would use the funds to accelerate the development of spatial intelligence models and of its product Marble, capable of creating persistent 3D environments from images, videos or text commands.
The purchase will be made entirely in stock and still depends on regulatory approvals and other customary conditions. AMD expects to complete the transaction by the end of 2026.
