AMD to acquire Fei-Fei Li's World Labs for $8.2 billion in all-stock deal

TLDR

• AMD agreed to acquire spatial-intelligence startup World Labs for $8.2 billion in an all-stock deal, expected to close by the end of 2026 subject to regulatory approval.¹²
• World Labs co-founder and CEO Fei-Fei Li will join AMD as executive vice president and chief scientist, reporting directly to chair and CEO Lisa Su.¹²
• World Labs, founded in 2024, builds "world models" that let AI systems understand and generate 3D physical environments, aimed at robotics, gaming and simulation; its product is called Marble.²³
• AMD was already an investor in World Labs, having put money into the startup's roughly $1 billion round in February 2026 alongside Nvidia, the same rival AMD is racing to match on world-model technology for physical AI and robotics.²

AMD has agreed to acquire World Labs, the spatial-intelligence startup led by Stanford professor and former Google Cloud AI chief scientist Fei-Fei Li, for $8.2 billion in an all-stock transaction.¹ The deal, announced by both companies on September 28, is expected to close by the end of 2026, pending regulatory approval.¹² As part of the acquisition, Li will join AMD as executive vice president and chief scientist, reporting to chair and CEO Lisa Su, while continuing to lead the World Labs team inside AMD.¹²

World Labs was founded in 2024 and has focused on building "world models," AI systems trained to understand, reason about and generate three-dimensional physical environments rather than just text or images.²³ Its flagship product, Marble, generates persistent, explorable 3D worlds from text, images or video, with intended uses spanning robotics training, gaming, film and simulation.³ The startup had raised roughly $230 million in a 2024 seed round backed by a16z, NEA and Nvidia's venture arm at a valuation above $1 billion, then closed a roughly $1 billion round in February 2026 that counted both AMD and Nvidia among its investors.² That prior overlap means AMD is folding in a company it had already backed, and one whose other lead investor is the GPU rival AMD is trying to out-compete on physical AI and robotics workloads, where Nvidia has been pushing its own Cosmos world-model platform.²

Why it matters: for AMD, buying out a startup it already had a stake in, alongside the same rival it is trying to beat, is an unusually direct way to close the gap with Nvidia's world-model push into robotics and physical AI, and it hands AMD one of the field's most recognized researchers as chief scientist in the process.