AMD to acquire Fei-Fei Li's World Labs for $8.2 billion

AMD is acquiring World Labs, one of the leading developers of deep learning models built to understand physical reality, in an $8.2 billion deal the two companies announced on September 28.

The acquisition will bring World Labs founder Fei-Fei Li to AMD as executive vice president and chief scientist. World Labs said in a statement that AI development now requires “close collaboration across model research, systems and compute.” AMD, for its part, says that understanding frontier workloads like those built at World Labs will shape its chip-making roadmap.

From ImageNet to World Labs

Li is a Stanford computer science professor and a pioneer of artificial intelligence, particularly computer vision, for her work on the ImageNet database and the recognition competitions it inspired. She founded World Labs in 2024 to build models with a more robust understanding of the physical world, arguing that true general intelligence requires a grounding in physics and the ability to reason about data beyond text.

World Labs' first product, Marble, is pitched as a tool for creating entertainment experiences and for generating simulated environments used to train robots.

A bet on world models

“World model” remains a loosely defined term, covering everything from language models trained to understand visual inputs to systems capable of generating and sustaining a high-fidelity simulation of reality.

The deal is likely to help AMD compete with long-standing rival Nvidia in building an ecosystem for AI-specific chips. Nvidia already offers a family of open-weight world models such as Cosmos, while AMD has so far released only text- and video-based models to the public.

World models are seen as vital to deploying generative AI on robotic platforms, from autonomous vehicles to industrial robots and general-purpose humanoids. Because useful real-world data for training general-purpose robots is scarce, synthetic data produced by world models is expected to be key to the plans of companies such as Tesla and Figure.

Partners since last year

AMD and World Labs formed an inference optimization and training partnership last year, and ties have remained close. Li was a guest at AMD's CES presentation earlier this year, where she showed off Marble.

In a post announcing the deal, Li described the partnership as the result of 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,” she wrote. “To do this requires scaling our efforts, widening our reach, and getting closer to the hardware.”

The acquisition is expected to close before the end of the year, subject to regulatory approval.