AMD acquiring Fei-Fei Li's World Labs AI firm in deal worth $8.2B

AMD is buying World Labs, the San Francisco AI lab founded by Fei-Fei Li, in an all-stock deal valued at about $8.2 billion. World Labs develops a "world model" that simulates physics-aware 3D environments; a demo called Marble showed a model generating a three-dimensional scene from a few images. Li, a former Stanford professor and Google researcher, will join AMD as chief scientist and executive vice president. AMD previously invested in World Labs and will keep the lab separate from its chipmaking business until the transaction closes later this year.

The acquisition gives AMD direct access to frontier research that can inform the design of future AI chips and supports development of physically grounded applications such as robotics and autonomous systems, which can learn inside simulated worlds before real-world deployment. At $8.2 billion, the deal is AMD’s second-largest purchase after the roughly $50 billion Xilinx acquisition and underscores a broader tech M&A trend for talent and research: comparable recent moves include OpenAI’s acquisition of io, Nvidia’s purchases of Groq and Hugging Face, and Meta’s $14 billion minority stake in Scale AI. The move positions AMD to integrate long-term model roadmaps with chip strategy and to compete more aggressively in AI infrastructure and research.