AMD Agrees to Acquire World Labs in $8.2 Billion All-Stock Deal

AMD has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire World Labs, a San Francisco-based artificial intelligence model and research lab led by Dr. Fei-Fei Li, in an all-stock transaction valued at approximately $8.2 billion, the Santa Clara, California-based chipmaker announced on September 28, 2026.

The transaction is expected to close by the end of 2026, subject to regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions. World Labs confirmed the agreement in its own September 28, 2026 announcement, stating that it has signed a definitive agreement to join AMD.

AMD stated that the acquisition will bring a world-class team of researchers and model experts to the company, strengthening its ability to develop AI hardware, software and systems around the needs of emerging models and applications. As AI expands into reasoning, robotics, simulation and physical AI, the demands on compute infrastructure become more diverse, according to the company, and World Labs’ expertise in developing advanced models will give AMD deeper insight into how workloads are evolving and help shape its future technology roadmaps. AMD said the acquisition advances its strategy to deliver AI infrastructure for an open ecosystem.

“Building the compute platforms for the next generation of AI requires a deep understanding of how models are evolving,” said Dr. Lisa Su, AMD’s chair and chief executive officer. “Fei-Fei and the World Labs team bring exceptional research leadership and model expertise. Together, we can use that insight to develop the hardware, software and systems that will power the next generation of AI and strengthen the open AI ecosystem.”

“Advancing the next generation of AI technology requires close collaboration across model research, systems and compute,” said Dr. Fei-Fei Li, World Labs’ co-founder and chief executive officer. “Joining AMD will give our team the resources and engineering depth to accelerate our research and help define the infrastructure needed for the next era of AI.”

Post-Close Leadership

Following the close of the transaction, Li will join AMD as executive vice president and chief scientist, reporting to Su, and the World Labs team will continue to focus on advancing AI model research, according to AMD’s announcement. World Labs stated that co-founders Justin Johnson and Ben Mildenhall will work with Li to continue leading the World Labs team as it joins AMD, forming what the company called a world-leading frontier research organization. The combined companies are committed to building an end-to-end open AI ecosystem spanning hardware, software, platforms, and widely accessible open models, according to World Labs.

World Labs Background and Prior AMD Ties

World Labs develops spatial-intelligence models that generate, reconstruct and simulate interactive 3D environments from text, image and video inputs, as well as technology for robotic learning and simulation. Li founded the company at the beginning of 2024 with co-founders Ben Mildenhall and Justin Johnson, she wrote in a September 28, 2026 post describing the company’s path to the AMD agreement.

World Labs describes Marble as its first product, enabling users to create spatially cohesive, high-fidelity and persistent 3D worlds from images, video or text. The company made Marble available to all users on November 12, 2025, and launched a public World API for generating explorable 3D worlds from text, images and video on January 21, 2026, according to its research and insights index.

On September 1, 2026, World Labs released Atlas, a world model that Li described as a first-of-its-kind omni model architecture addressing new camera view prediction: trained from scratch, Atlas predicts the next view from an input of 2D images, and Li stated that it has essentially solved a long-standing computer vision problem called sparse reconstruction. World Labs also acquired SceniX, announcing the deal on July 21, 2026 as advancing spatial intelligence for robotics; Li wrote that the acquisition builds toward a robotics simulation capability.

The AMD agreement follows an existing financial and technical relationship between the two companies. World Labs announced on February 18, 2026 that it had raised $1 billion in new funding from investors including AMD, Autodesk, Emerson Collective, Fidelity Management & Research Company, NVIDIA, and Sea. Li wrote that Su was an early investor in World Labs.

World Labs stated that it began a deep technical partnership with AMD in 2025, starting with model training and inference optimization on AMD GPUs. As the teams worked together, World Labs concluded it would be a natural fit to bring together the companies’ AI ecosystem of software and hardware, foundation models, and applications, according to its announcement.