AMD Buys Fei-Fei Li's World Labs for $8.2 Billion, Making Her Its Chief Scientist

At AMD’s CES presentation in Las Vegas in January 2026, Fei-Fei Li and Lisa Su showed an artificial intelligence model called Marble turning a few images into a three-dimensional scene. “Intelligent agents, whether it’s robots or vehicles or even tools, can learn inside very rich physics-aware digital worlds before they even need to be deployed into the real one, making them much safer,” Li said. The following month, AMD joined a $1 billion funding round for her startup, World Labs.

On Monday, AMD said it would buy World Labs for about $8.2 billion, paid entirely in AMD stock.

The chipmaker is buying a model-research lab partly to learn where AI workloads are headed before it designs the hardware to run them. Li will become an AMD executive vice president and chief scientist, reporting to Su.

The price

AMD and World Labs signed the merger agreement on Sept. 26 and announced it two days later. The companies expect the transaction to close by the end of 2026, subject to regulatory approval. It would be AMD’s second-largest acquisition, behind the roughly $50 billion purchase of Xilinx completed in 2022.

The final share count is not known. AMD will calculate it from the daily volume-weighted average price of its stock over the 10 trading days ending on the second trading day before closing. The shares will be issued through a private, unregistered placement.

World Labs emerged from stealth in 2024 with $230 million in funding and a $1 billion valuation. It raised another $1 billion in February 2026 from investors including AMD, Nvidia and Autodesk, but did not disclose a new valuation. Bloomberg had reported in January that the company was discussing funding at about $5 billion.

World Labs has roughly 70 employees, including robotics specialists added through its July 2026 purchase of SceniX. The proposed price works out to more than $100 million for each employee.

What World Labs builds

“World model” remains a loose label. In World Labs’ case, it means software that generates or reconstructs a three-dimensional environment from text, images or video, then predicts new camera views and how a scene changes over time. Li compares Atlas, the company’s newest model, with a language model predicting its next token, except Atlas predicts the next view from two-dimensional images.

Marble, World Labs’ first commercial product, launched in November 2025 with paid plans costing as much as $95 a month. Atlas followed on Sept. 1, 2026, and is available in early access to selected partners. World Labs says Atlas can reconstruct scenes and control virtual camera movements, with possible uses in design and robot training.

World Labs reproduced the baseline results used in its own Atlas reconstruction comparisons, and no independent test is included. Monday’s announcements did not include a revenue figure for World Labs.

Li entered AI as a graduate student in 2000. Her lab created ImageNet, the labeled image database that helped advance computer vision. She later founded Google Cloud’s AI unit as chief scientist and became founding co-director of Stanford’s Human-Centered AI institute. At the beginning of 2024, she started World Labs with researchers Ben Mildenhall and Justin Johnson.

“The universe isn’t made up of words; it’s made of real things,” Li wrote Monday.

Why AMD wants a lab

AMD and World Labs began working together in 2025 on model training and inference optimization using AMD graphics processors. Su, AMD’s chief executive for 12 years, was an early investor. “The more you understand end to end, the better system you are going to build,” she said in a Bloomberg Television interview Monday. Li, in her Monday post, called Su “a great friend.”

Nvidia already provides open-weight world models through its Cosmos family, while AMD has released only text and video models. Nvidia agreed in September 2026 to buy AI platform Hugging Face for almost $13 billion.

Autodesk invested $200 million in the February round and will serve as an adviser to World Labs. Its chief scientist, Daron Green, told TechCrunch in February that the partnership was still taking shape and would begin with media and entertainment. He suggested customers might start with a world-model sketch in World Labs, such as an office layout, and then work on specific pieces, such as the design of a desk, in Autodesk’s software. “You could anticipate us consuming their models or them consuming our models in different settings,” he said.

What AMD has not said

Monday’s announcements did not mention Autodesk. AMD plans to keep World Labs separate from its chipmaking operation until closing, and says its researchers will continue their model work afterward.

The deal rests on figures supplied by the two companies. Neither AMD nor World Labs has said how existing investors such as Nvidia will be treated.

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Marcus Schuler

San Francisco

Editor-in-Chief and founder of Implicator.ai. Former ARD correspondent and senior broadcast journalist with 10+ years covering tech. Writes daily briefings on policy and market developments. Based in San Francisco. E-mail: editor@implicator.ai