AMD acquires World Labs for $8.2 billion; Fei-Fei Li named chief scientist

AMD announced today it will acquire research lab World Labs in an all-stock transaction valued at roughly $8.2 billion. Founded in 2024, World Labs reached a billion-dollar valuation within months; its first commercial product, a world-generation model called Marble that builds interactive three-dimensional environments from text, launched in 2025. The deal is expected to close by year end.

Founder and chief executive Fei-Fei Li will join AMD as senior vice president and chief scientist, reporting directly to chief executive Lisa Su. The World Labs team will continue focusing on AI model research, and the company said the acquisition will strengthen its ability to develop hardware, software and systems around the needs of emerging models and applications.

In a Substack post, Li said: "The move to AMD is a natural continuation of the mission to create foundation models that go beyond large language models (LLMs)." Su said building compute platforms for the next generation of AI requires a deep understanding of how models evolve, and that World Labs' research expertise will enable AMD to develop the infrastructure that powers the next wave while reinforcing the open ecosystem.

The transaction follows a string of billion-dollar deals in the sector. Earlier this month Nvidia announced its acquisition of Hugging Face for about $13 billion. Both deals reflect a race among compute providers to secure control of the model and tool layer that drives hardware demand.