AMD to Acquire Fei-Fei Li's World Labs for $8.2 Billion

AMD, the Santa Clara-based chipmaker, announced on September 28, 2026 that it has agreed to acquire World Labs, the San Francisco artificial intelligence startup founded by researcher Fei-Fei Li, in an all-stock transaction valued at about $8.2 billion.¹²³⁴

Terms of the deal

AMD's official statements describe the purchase as a stock-only deal worth roughly $8.2 billion, with completion anticipated before 2026 ends, contingent on regulatory sign-off and other standard conditions.⁴⁵⁶

AMD stated that the acquisition will bolster its capacity to build AI-related hardware, software, and systems tailored to newer model categories, provide sharper visibility into shifting AI workload trends, and further its push to supply AI infrastructure for an open ecosystem.⁵⁶

World Labs and its technology

Per AMD's press materials, World Labs—established in 2024—builds what it terms spatial-intelligence models, which can produce, rebuild, and simulate interactive three-dimensional settings using text, images, and video as inputs. Reporting by CNBC described the company's work as building world models that can simulate 3D environments, which researchers expect could help advance robotics and other physically grounded AI applications.³⁵⁶¹

In 2025 the company launched Marble, a world-generation model that lets users create interactive 3D worlds from a prompt, according to The Verge. At the announcement, Li and AMD chief executive Lisa Su presented a demonstration of Marble creating a three-dimensional scene from a handful of images, CNBC reported.³¹

TechCrunch reported that World Labs' models are intended to help systems understand physical reality, and that world models are considered important for efforts to deploy generative AI on robotic platforms. The outlet noted that Nvidia already offers a suite of open-weight world models called Cosmos, while AMD has so far only offered text- and video-based models publicly.²

Fei-Fei Li's new role

Fei-Fei Li, described by CNBC as widely regarded as an AI pioneer, previously was a Stanford professor and led AI research at Google before founding World Labs. Once the transaction is finalized, she is set to take on the roles of executive vice president and chief scientist at AMD, as reported by the company and several news organizations.¹³⁵⁶

TechCrunch noted that Li had been a guest at AMD's CES presentation in Las Vegas in January 2026, and that the two companies had already formed an inference optimization and training partnership announced alongside the acquisition.²

Funding history and prior AMD investment

NBC News reported that World Labs secured $1 billion in a February 2026 investment round backed by AMD and Nvidia among others, and noted that Bloomberg News had earlier revealed in January that the startup was engaged in funding talks. The Verge separately reported that the company reached a $1 billion valuation within months of its founding, a characterization NBC News' account of the February round appears to contest on timing.⁷³

CNBC reported, citing a single source, that AMD had previously invested in World Labs and that the World Labs purchase is AMD's second-largest acquisition on record, after AMD's roughly $50 billion purchase of chipmaker Xilinx in 2022.¹

Industry context

CNBC situated the acquisition amid a broader trend of major AI-related tech buyouts, noting that OpenAI acquired Jony Ive's hardware venture io last year for roughly $6.4 billion, Nvidia laid out a combined $33 billion to buy Groq and Hugging Face, and Meta put $14 billion into a minority position in Scale AI during 2025.¹