AMD to acquire Fei-Fei Li's World Labs for $8.2 billion

AMD is acquiring World Labs, the artificial intelligence research lab co-founded by Fei-Fei Li, in an all-stock deal valued at approximately $8.2 billion, the company announced. The deal is expected to close by the end of the year.

World Labs launched in 2024 and reached a $1 billion valuation within months. This year the startup released its first commercial product, Marble, a world generation model that lets users create interactive 3D worlds from a text prompt.

Li, World Labs’ co-founder and CEO, will become AMD’s executive vice president and chief scientist, reporting directly to CEO Lisa Su, while the World Labs team stays in place to keep working on AI model research inside AMD. “Building the compute platforms for the next generation of AI requires a deep understanding of how models are evolving,” Su said in a statement. “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.”

Li described the move as a continuation of her research mission rather than an exit. “Just like I knew it was time to do a startup to jumpstart the work of creating foundation models beyond LLMs and achieve the most impact in AI, it’s again very clear that the right path for myself and World Labs is to continue our mission as a part of AMD,” she wrote on her Substack.

A pattern of chipmakers buying AI labs

The deal follows a similar move by Nvidia, which announced earlier this month that it would acquire Hugging Face for nearly $13 billion, suggesting chip companies are willing to pay large premiums not just for AI products but for the research teams behind them. AMD did not detail what specific products or chip designs will result from buying World Labs, saying only that the acquisition would strengthen “its ability to develop AI hardware, software and systems around the needs of emerging models and applications.” It remains unclear whether Marble will continue as a standalone product or how World Labs’ research agenda will be folded into AMD’s existing plans.

What happens to Marble, and how much independence the World Labs team keeps inside AMD, should become clearer once the deal closes by the end of the year.