AMD to buy Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs for $8.2 billion

On September 28, 2026, AMD announced that it had entered into a definitive agreement to acquire World Labs, an AI model lab led by Fei-Fei Li. The deal is valued at approximately $8.2 billion, paid in stock. It is expected to close by the end of 2026, subject to regulatory approval and other customary closing conditions.

World Labs is based in San Francisco and works on spatial intelligence. Its models create, reconstruct, and simulate interactive three-dimensional scenes from text, images, or video, and the company also develops technology for training and simulating robots.

AMD explains its interest by pointing out that AI is moving beyond text tasks into reasoning, robotics, simulation, and physical AI, while the demands on computing infrastructure are becoming more varied. World Labs' experience should give AMD a deeper understanding of how workloads are changing and help it shape future technology plans. Strategically, the deal extends AMD's line of building infrastructure for an open AI ecosystem.

"Building computing platforms for the next generation of AI requires a deep understanding of how models evolve," said AMD chair and CEO Lisa Su. According to her, Fei-Fei and the World Labs team bring exceptional research leadership and expertise in models, and together the companies can build hardware and software for the next stage of AI and strengthen the open ecosystem.

Fei-Fei Li, co-founder and CEO of World Labs, says that joining AMD will give the team the resources and engineering depth to accelerate research and determine what infrastructure the next stage of AI development requires.

After the deal closes, the World Labs team will continue to work on AI model research. Fei-Fei Li herself will join AMD as executive vice president and chief scientist, reporting to Lisa Su.

Closing the deal depends on regulatory approval and other customary conditions, so the timeline may slip.

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Translation editor: Салтанов А.