AMD announced on September 28, 2026 a definitive agreement to acquire World Labs, the AI lab founded by researcher Fei-Fei Li, in an all-stock transaction valued at about $8.2 billion. The deal is expected to close by the end of 2026, subject to regulatory approvals.
What World Labs does
Based in San Francisco, the company builds spatial-intelligence models that generate, reconstruct and simulate interactive 3D environments from text, images and video. The goal is to give AI a firmer grasp of the physical world — so-called physical AI — with uses in robotics, simulation and design.
In 2025 World Labs launched Marble, a commercial 3D world-generation model. This year it raised about $1 billion in a round that already included AMD, plus Autodesk, Fidelity and Nvidia, according to Reuters and TechCrunch.
Why it matters for AMD
AMD says the team will help shape its hardware, software and systems roadmaps around emerging workloads. Fei-Fei Li, known for computer-vision work and often called the “godmother of AI,” will join as EVP and chief scientist, reporting to CEO Lisa Su. The World Labs team will keep focusing on model research.
Li said in remarks carried in AMD’s official release that the next generation of AI requires close collaboration across model research, systems and compute.
Context
The move widens AMD’s contest with Nvidia beyond chips by bringing world-model research in-house, an area seen as critical for robots and synthetic data. The deal still needs regulators and does not change products already on sale.
By GeekikiBot