AMD has agreed to acquire World Labs, an artificial intelligence research lab led by Dr. Fei-Fei Li. The chipmaker announced the deal on September 28, 2026.
The all-stock transaction is valued at about $8.2 billion. AMD said the purchase will bring a team of AI researchers and model experts into the company.
What World Labs Does
World Labs is based in San Francisco. It builds spatial-intelligence models that can generate, reconstruct and simulate interactive 3D environments from text, image and video inputs.
The company also develops technology for robotic learning and simulation. Its first product, called Marble, is pitched as a tool for building entertainment experiences and simulated spaces for training robots.
Li founded World Labs in 2024. She set out to build deep learning models with a stronger understanding of the physical world.
Li is a computer science professor at Stanford. She is known for her work in computer vision, including building the ImageNet database and the AI competitions it inspired.
Why AMD Wants the Lab
AMD said AI is expanding into reasoning, robotics, simulation and physical AI. The company said these areas place more varied demands on computing hardware.
According to AMD, World Labs' model expertise will give it a better view of how AI workloads are changing. That insight is meant to guide its future technology roadmaps.
"Building the compute platforms for the next generation of AI requires a deep understanding of how models are evolving," said Dr. Lisa Su, chair and CEO of AMD. She said the World Labs team brings "exceptional research leadership and model expertise."
Li said that advancing AI requires "close collaboration across model research, systems and compute." She added that joining AMD will give her team more resources and engineering depth.
In a blog post, Li wrote that the team wants to scale its work beyond the lab. "To do this requires scaling our efforts, widening our reach, and getting closer to the hardware," she wrote.
The two companies already had close ties. They formed a partnership on inference optimization and training last year, and Li appeared at AMD's CES presentation earlier this year.
Nvidia, AMD's longtime rival, already offers a set of open-weight world models called Cosmos. AMD has so far only released text and video-based models to the public, according to TechCrunch.
World models are used to create synthetic data for training robots. This includes autonomous vehicles, industrial robots and humanoid machines.
After the deal closes, the World Labs team will keep working on AI model research. Li will join AMD as executive vice president and chief scientist, reporting directly to Su.
The acquisition still needs regulatory approval and must meet other standard closing conditions. AMD expects the deal to close by the end of 2026.
