AMD has agreed to acquire World Labs, the spatial intelligence startup co-founded and led by AI researcher Fei-Fei Li, in an all-stock transaction valued at approximately $8.2 billion, as the chipmaker expands its focus beyond AI hardware into model research and emerging workloads.
The companies announced the definitive agreement on September 28. The transaction is expected to close by the end of 2026, subject to regulatory approvals and customary closing conditions. Following completion, Li will join AMD as executive vice president and chief scientist, reporting to AMD Chair and CEO Lisa Su.
San Francisco-based World Labs develops spatial intelligence models designed to generate, reconstruct and simulate interactive 3D environments from text, images and video. Its research also extends to robotic learning and simulation, areas that AMD sees becoming increasingly important as AI expands beyond language models into reasoning, robotics and physical AI.
World Labs was founded by Li alongside Justin Johnson, Ben Mildenhall and Christoph Lassner. Its first commercial product, Marble, uses generative world models to create persistent and spatially coherent 3D environments from inputs including text, images, videos and 3D layouts.
The acquisition brings model-development expertise directly into AMD, which said understanding how emerging AI workloads are evolving could help inform the design of future hardware, software and systems. World Labs will continue focusing on AI model research after the transaction closes.
AMD was already an investor in World Labs. In February, the startup announced $1 billion in new funding from investors including AMD, Nvidia, Autodesk, Fidelity Management & Research Company and others. World Labs said the capital would support its work in spatial intelligence across areas including creativity, robotics and scientific discovery.
The startup has also been expanding its robotics capabilities. In July, World Labs acquired robotics company SceniX as part of an effort to combine spatial intelligence, world models, simulation and real-world learning for robotic systems.
For AMD, the deal extends its AI strategy into the research layer at a time when computing requirements are becoming more varied. The company said World Labs' model expertise would provide greater insight into workloads involving simulation, reasoning and physical AI, which could influence its future technology roadmaps.
The $8.2 billion transaction marks a significant expansion of AMD's AI portfolio, pairing its existing computing infrastructure with a research organisation focused on building models that can understand and interact with three-dimensional environments.
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