AMD Acquires World Labs for $8.2 Billion, Fei-Fei Li to Serve as AMD’s Chief Scientist.

According to Reuters, AMD announced it will acquire World Labs, an AI startup founded by AI scientist Li Feifei, in an all-stock transaction valued at $8.2 billion, with the deal expected to close by the end of 2026. After the transaction wraps up, Li Feifei will join AMD as executive vice president and chief scientist, reporting directly to CEO Lisa Su. The acquisition will grant AMD access to World Labs’ research capabilities in spatial intelligence—a technology designed to help AI systems understand, reason about, and simulate 3D environments and physical interactions, with applications spanning robotics, simulation, design, and other real-world use cases. AMD said World Labs’ research will help the company understand emerging AI workloads and guide its hardware, software, and systems technology roadmap. Li Feifei noted that World Labs has been in deep technical collaboration with AMD since last year, initially focusing on optimizing model training and inference using AMD GPUs. As the partnership advanced, both parties identified synergies in integrating software, hardware, foundation models, and application ecosystems. World Labs completed a $1 billion funding round earlier this year, in which AMD also participated.