AMD to Acquire Fei-Fei Li's World Labs for $8.2 Billion

AMD announced it will acquire World Labs, the AI startup founded by Stanford professor Fei-Fei Li, for $8.2 billion. The deal is expected to close before the end of the year, and Li will join AMD as executive vice president and chief scientist.

World Labs, founded in 2024, builds deep learning models that understand the physical world. The two companies already had an inference optimization partnership, and the acquisition gives AMD direct access to frontier AI workloads to inform its chip development.

The move strengthens AMD's AI ecosystem in its competition with Nvidia, and supports scaling of world models used in robotics, autonomous vehicles and synthetic training data.