AMD agrees to buy Fei-Fei Li's World Labs in $8.2B deal

Marble had launched late in 2025, as World Labs’ first commercial product. It built persistent, downloadable 3D worlds and scenes from text, image, or video, rendering them with Gaussian splats—a technique that assembles a scene from countless small, overlapping blobs of color and light so the result can be navigated rather than merely played back. The demonstration put the two leaders on the same stage. Marble did not answer in language; it generated and held interactive environments of the kind physical systems would later need to explore. Part of the model ran on AMD accelerators, the fruit of work already under way on training and inference. The keynote simply showed what the alliance could already produce.

Fei-Fei Li founded World Labs in 2024 with Justin Johnson, Christoph Lassner, and Ben Mildenhall. The four raised $230 million in initial funding. Within months the company reached a $1 billion valuation. Headquartered in San Francisco, World Labs employed about seventy people and built spatial-intelligence models that generate, reconstruct, and simulate interactive three-dimensional environments from text, image, and video inputs, as well as technology for robotic learning and simulation.

In February 2026 the lab raised $1 billion in a fresh round that took its valuation to $5 billion. AMD invested in the round. Nvidia was an investor as well. “We began a deep technical partnership with AMD last year, starting with model training and inference optimization on AMD GPUs,” Li said. “As our teams worked together, we realized it would be a natural fit to bring together our AI ecosystem of software and hardware, foundation models, and applications.” The chipmaker that had helped train and run the models now held equity in the lab that made them. World Labs remained a private company.

On September 28, 2026, AMD and World Labs announced a definitive agreement. The deal is valued at approximately $8.2 billion, all stock. Li posted on LinkedIn and social media that day to mark the news, calling Su a “great friend.” World Labs issued its own note under the heading “World Labs is Joining AMD,” setting out why the lab was moving under the chipmaker’s roof.

“Building the compute platforms for the next generation of AI requires a deep understanding of how models are evolving,” Su said. “Fei-Fei and the World Labs team bring exceptional research leadership and model expertise. Together, we can use that insight to develop the hardware, software and systems that will power the next generation of AI and strengthen the open AI ecosystem.” Li answered in kind: “Advancing the next generation of AI technology requires close collaboration across model research, systems and compute.” And: “Joining AMD will give our team the resources and engineering depth to accelerate our research and help define the infrastructure needed for the next era of AI.”

The press release carried the date of the twenty-eighth; the story ran widely on the twenty-ninth and thirtieth. Li will join AMD as executive vice president and chief scientist, reporting to CEO Lisa Su. Patrick Moorhead, chief analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, called the purchase a talent and model-insight buy, not a revenue play. AMD gets the people building the models its future chips will have to run. The target, he said, is physical AI development. He noted Li’s case that without having a focused hardware effort, AI is hobbled in efficiency.

Measured against the company’s own record, the all-stock sum of approximately $8.2 billion made the transaction AMD’s second-largest acquisition ever. Only the roughly $50 billion purchase of Xilinx, closed in 2022, ranked higher. ATI had cost $5.4 billion in 2006. ZT Systems went for $4.9 billion in 2025. Pensando cost $1.9 billion in 2022. A model research lab now sat on a scale AMD had previously reserved for chip designers and systems houses.

Atlas, World Labs’ product, generates synthetic training data for robotics and autonomous systems: training material the model produces rather than collects from the physical world. Atlas will power future versions of Marble. Justin Johnson and Ben Mildenhall will continue leading the World Labs team with Li as the group becomes a dedicated frontier research organization, still concentrated on advancing AI model research after the close. AMD plans to keep World Labs operating separately from its chipmaking business until the transaction closes.

“Now that we have tangible proof of the possibilities, we want to do everything we can to accelerate the future,” Li said. “To do this requires scaling our efforts, widening our reach, and getting closer to the hardware.” The all-stock deal is expected to close by the end of 2026, subject to regulatory approval. Through that window the lab stays a distinct unit, the agreement still awaiting the regulators.