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

AMD has signed a definitive agreement to buy World Labs, the spatial intelligence startup Fei-Fei Li cofounded in 2024, paying entirely in AMD stock in a deal the chipmaker values at about $8.2 billion. AMD's announcement says it expects the deal to complete before 2027, once regulators sign off and the usual closing conditions are met. Li will become executive vice president and chief scientist, reporting to CEO Lisa Su, and her researchers will keep working on models inside AMD.

Why a chipmaker wants a model lab

AMD frames the purchase as a way to see where AI workloads are heading before it designs the silicon for them. As models move into robotics, simulation and physical tasks, the company argues, the compute they need gets harder to predict, and owning a frontier research team gives it earlier signals for its roadmap.

The two companies were already close. They began a joint effort last year on training and inference optimization for AMD GPUs, and in her post on the deal Li discloses that Su was an early investor in World Labs. Li says her team needs to be "getting closer to the hardware" to scale beyond what a startup can manage alone.

World Labs builds models that generate, reconstruct and simulate interactive 3D scenes from text, images and video. Its first commercial product, Marble, turns a prompt into an explorable 3D world, and its newer Atlas model predicts unseen camera views from a handful of 2D images. It also bought SceniX to build out robotics simulation. The Verge notes the startup hit a $1 billion valuation within months of launch.

The Nvidia backdrop

The deal gives AMD an answer to Nvidia's Cosmos family of open-weight world models, a gap TechCrunch highlights, since AMD's public models have so far covered text and video. It also comes in the same month Nvidia struck a deal worth close to $13 billion for Hugging Face, a sign that chip suppliers now want to own the model and developer layers that sit on top of their hardware. Li says World Labs will keep building in the open.

What we don't know yet

AMD has not disclosed the exchange ratio, headcount, or how World Labs investors are treated. Neither company has said whether Marble and Atlas stay available on current terms, whether they will be tuned to run best on AMD chips, or which regulators will review the deal. Su's early stake in World Labs is disclosed by Li, but AMD has not explained how it was handled in approving the purchase.