AMD agreed on September 28, 2026, to acquire World Labs, the spatial-intelligence startup founded by Stanford computer science professor Fei-Fei Li, for $8.2 billion in an all-stock transaction expected to close by year-end1,2,5,8.
Li will join AMD as executive vice president and chief scientist, reporting directly to AMD CEO Lisa Su7. The World Labs team will continue to focus on advancing AI model research inside AMD.
What AMD gets
World Labs, co-founded in early 2024 by Li, Ben Mildenhall, and Justin Johnson, develops spatial-intelligence models that construct and simulate interactive 3D environments from text, video, and image inputs. The startup reached a $1 billion valuation within months of its founding. In 2025, World Labs shipped its first commercial product, a world-generation model called Marble that lets users create interactive 3D worlds from a prompt. Earlier in September 2026, the company unveiled Atlas, a multimodal autoregressive diffusion transformer designed for spatial reconstruction, space-time simulation, and high-resolution video generation.
Li is considered a pioneer in AI and computer vision for her work building the ImageNet database and the competitions it inspired. She founded World Labs on the thesis that true general intelligence required grounding in physics and the ability to reason about data beyond text.
Strategic rationale
AMD and World Labs formed an inference optimization-and-training partnership in 2025, and Li was a guest at AMD's CES presentation earlier this year. World Labs justified the deal by saying AI development required close collaboration across model research, systems, and compute. AMD said that understanding frontier workloads, like those created at World Labs, will shape its chip-making roadmap.
"Building the compute platforms for the next generation of AI requires a deep understanding of how models are evolving," said Lisa Su. Su added: "Fei-Fei and the World Labs team bring exceptional research leadership and model expertise".
In a post announcing the deal, Li described the acquisition as driven by a desire to scale World Labs' technical breakthroughs beyond the lab: "Now that we have tangible proof of the possibilities, we want to do everything we can to accelerate the future," Li wrote, adding that doing so "requires scaling".
ANALYSIS Acquiring a research lab whose models stress both training and inference hardware gives AMD a captive workload to co-optimize silicon against, a tighter feedback loop than the arm's-length partnership the two companies maintained previously.
The deal lands the same day Nvidia Corp., AMD's primary GPU rival, authorized an additional $150 billion in share repurchases, the largest buyback program in market history[2]. ◆ The contrast in capital deployment is notable: Nvidia is returning cash to shareholders while AMD is spending to deepen its AI research capabilities through acquisition.
The transaction is contingent upon regulatory approvals and customary closing conditions.