AMD has announced the acquisition of World Labs, an AI startup founded by Fei-Fei Li, for $8.2 billion. The transaction is expected to close by the end of the year. Following the deal, Fei-Fei Li will join AMD as its chief scientist, while her co-founders, Justin Johnson and Ben Mildenhall, will continue to lead the research team at World Labs.
World Labs specializes in spatial-intelligence models designed to generate and simulate interactive 3D environments. The company launched its first commercial product, Marble, late last year. Future versions of this tool will be powered by the startup's latest world model, known as Atlas. The team remains committed to developing open-source AI models.
The companies previously collaborated on optimizing model training and inference using AMD Instinct accelerators and the ROCm software stack. AMD participated in the $1 billion funding round for World Labs in February, which also included Nvidia as an investor. This acquisition marks the second-largest deal for AMD, following the purchase of Xilinx for $50 billion in 2022.
AMD has a history of strategic acquisitions to bolster its technology roadmap. Previous notable deals include the purchase of ZT Systems for $4.9 billion in 2025, Pensando for $1.9 billion in 2022, and ATI for $5.4 billion in 2006. The integration of World Labs is intended to align model research more closely with hardware development.
