AMD to Acquire Fei-Fei Li's World Labs in $8.2 Billion All-Stock Deal

The chipmaker is bringing the spatial AI startup and co-founder Dr. Fei-Fei Li in-house to align future silicon with next-generation model architecture.

By The Company WireSeptember 28, 2026 at 9:31 PM UTC3 min read

AMD — AMD to Acquire Fei-Fei Li's World Labs in $8.2 Billion All-Stock Deal. Photo: The Verge.

AMD has reached an agreement to acquire artificial intelligence research startup World Labs in an all-stock transaction valued at approximately $8.2 billion, according to a report by The Verge (https://www.theverge.com/tech/1001749/amd-world-labs-ai-acquisition-deal).

World Labs was co-founded in 2024 by prominent computer scientist Dr. Fei-Fei Li and reached a $1 billion valuation within months of its founding. In 2025, the company launched its first commercial product, Marble, a world generation model designed to generate interactive 3D environments from a prompt.

The deal is scheduled to close by the end of 2026. Following the close, Li will step into the role of executive vice president and chief scientist at AMD, reporting directly to AMD CEO Lisa Su. The World Labs research team will remain focused on advancing AI model research.

AMD stated that the purchase will bolster its capacity to develop hardware, software, and systems tailored to the computational requirements of emerging AI models.

"Just like I knew it was time to do a startup to jumpstart the work of creating foundation models beyond LLMs and achieve the most impact in AI, it’s again very clear that the right path for myself and World Labs is to continue our mission as a part of AMD," Li wrote in a post on her Substack. "Together we’re committed to keep pushing the frontier of AI to solve real problems, and doing so openly with the community and the entire ecosystem."

AMD CEO Lisa Su said the acquisition directly targets the convergence of model design and silicon architecture. "Building the compute platforms for the next generation of AI requires a deep understanding of how models are evolving," Su said in a statement. "Fei-Fei and the World Labs team bring exceptional research leadership and model expertise. Together, we can use that insight to develop the hardware, software and systems that will power the next generation of AI and strengthen the open AI ecosystem."

The acquisition comes amid massive consolidation across the semiconductor and AI sectors, following Nvidia's announcement earlier this month that it plans to acquire Hugging Face for nearly $13 billion.