AMD Acquires Fei-Fei Li's World Labs for $8.2 Billion in Its Second-Biggest Deal Ever

AMD has agreed to acquire World Labs, the AI research lab led by Fei-Fei Li, in an all-stock deal valued at about $8.2 billion. Announced on September 28, it is AMD's second-largest acquisition ever after its roughly $50 billion purchase of Xilinx in 2022, and pulls AMD into AI model research rather than just the chips that run models (TechCrunch, SDxCentral).

The deal

Term	Detail
Value	About $8.2 billion, all stock (share count not yet fixed)
Merger agreement signed	September 26, per an SEC filing
Announced	September 28, 2026
Expected close	By the end of 2026, subject to regulatory approval
Fei-Fei Li's new role	Executive vice president and chief scientist, reporting to Lisa Su

The filing details come from CRN Asia. Co-founders Justin Johnson and Ben Mildenhall are reported to stay on to lead the World Labs team inside AMD, which will continue AI model research. World Labs operates separately from AMD's chip business until the deal closes.

What AMD is buying

World Labs, founded in San Francisco in 2024, builds spatial intelligence models: AI systems that generate, reconstruct and simulate interactive 3D environments from text, images and video. Its first product, Marble, creates persistent 3D worlds from images, video, text and 3D layouts; Li and Su demonstrated it earlier this year building a 3D scene from a few images. The roughly 70-person team includes a robotics group added through the acquisition of SceniX in July.

Li, widely credited with creating the ImageNet dataset that helped launch modern deep learning, takes a senior executive post, which signals more than a talent hire.

Why a chipmaker wants a world-model lab

AMD and World Labs already had an inference optimisation and training partnership. Su's stated reasoning is that building compute platforms for future AI requires understanding how models are evolving, and AMD says frontier workloads like World Labs' will shape its chip roadmap. World Labs' technology targets robotics, industrial simulation and other "physical AI" uses where systems must reason about space rather than just text or images.

The Nvidia context

AMD has spent years trying to close the gap with Nvidia in AI data centre chips, and Nvidia has invested in physical AI and robotics. TweakTown frames the purchase as a direct answer to Nvidia's own acquisition activity (TweakTown), and SCMP describes the battle with Nvidia as intensifying. Buying an entire research lab rather than licensing technology signals that AMD sees model research as a front worth owning.

What to watch next

Watch for regulatory clearance, the final share count, and whether Marble and World Labs' simulation work are folded into AMD's software stack or continue as a largely independent research effort.

Related on Gadgets365

• Schneider Electric agrees to buy PTC for $22.6 billion
• Mistral raises €3 billion in Europe's largest tech funding round
• Meta releases Muse Spark Open