Advanced Micro Devices announced on September 28, 2026 that it has agreed to acquire World Labs, the San Francisco-based AI lab founded by Stanford professor Fei-Fei Li, for approximately $8.2 billion in an all-stock transaction. Under the deal, Li will become AMD's chief scientist and an executive vice president. The acquisition marks AMD's second-largest purchase on record, following the roughly $50 billion it paid for Xilinx in 2022, and places it among recent large AI talent acquisitions such as OpenAI's purchase of io for about $6.4 billion and NVIDIA's combined investments in Groq and Hugging Face.
This image shows the executives involved in the AMD-World Labs deal, illustrating the announcement described in the first paragraph of the article.
World Labs focuses on building AI systems that understand and simulate the physical world, a approach Li describes as necessary because 'the universe isn't made up of words; it's made of real things.' The lab has developed leading capabilities in spatial intelligence, including a model training team for images, video and spatial reconstruction, and after acquiring SceniX, it aims to provide industry-leading robotics simulation. Its flagship Atlas model is an omni architecture trained from scratch that can predict the next camera view from a set of 2D images, solving the long-standing sparse reconstruction problem by combining generative models with multiview geometry, and enabling applications ranging from reinforcement learning environments for robotics to scene generation for therapy and real-world reconstruction in fields like design and construction. In a demonstration with AMD CEO Lisa Su earlier this year, World Labs showed a model called Marble that could generate a 3D scene from only a few images, illustrating how such technology could allow intelligent agents to learn in physics-aware digital worlds before deployment.
Li explained that joining AMD will allow World Labs to scale its efforts, widen its reach, and get closer to hardware, addressing a limitation she sees in purely software-based AI: 'without having a focused hardware effort, AI is hobbled in efficiency. And scale. And for our purposes, remains trapped in the digital world.' AMD and World Labs have maintained a deep technical partnership since the startup's earliest days, including model training and inference optimization on AMD GPUs, and Li noted that Su has been an early investor and believer in the mission. AMD intends to keep World Labs separate from its chipmaking business until the transaction closes later this year, while continuing to pursue the shared goal of pushing frontier AI to solve real-world problems openly with the broader community and ecosystem.
This headshot of Fei-Fei Li accompanies her remarks about joining AMD as chief scientist and the strategic rationale for the acquisition.