AMD agreed to acquire World Labs, the spatial intelligence startup founded by Fei-Fei Li, in an all-stock deal worth about $8.2B, the companies said Monday.
Li becomes AMD’s executive vice president and chief scientist, reporting to chief executive Lisa Su. World Labs keeps its research mission and stays separate from AMD’s chip business until the transaction closes, expected before the end of the year subject to regulatory approval.
The startup builds world models, systems that generate, reconstruct and simulate three-dimensional environments from text, images or video. Its Atlas model can produce a virtual replica of a factory or warehouse from a handful of photos, including moving objects such as conveyor belts. An earlier product, Marble, turns prompts into interactive 3D scenes.
The logic runs both ways. AMD wants earlier visibility into how frontier models are built so it can shape future hardware, particularly for robotics and physical AI. Li has argued that language models alone cannot reason about distance, orientation or basic physics, and that capable systems need a grounding in the physical world.
AMD previously invested in World Labs and joined a $1B round that valued the company near $5B. The purchase price is the chipmaker’s second largest on record after its $50B acquisition of Xilinx, and it puts AMD more directly against Nvidia, which has spent years bundling models and services with its silicon.
