AMD agrees to buy Fei-Fei Li's World Labs for about $8.2 billion in stock

AMD has agreed to acquire World Labs, the AI startup co-founded by Stanford computer scientist Fei-Fei Li, in an all-stock deal worth about $8.2 billion. World Labs builds deep learning models meant to understand the physical world. It launched in 2024, reached a $1 billion valuation within months, and released a commercial world-generation model called Marble. Li will join AMD as executive vice president and chief scientist. The two companies formed an inference optimization and training partnership last year. World Labs said AI development requires 'close collaboration across model research, systems and compute.' AMD said understanding frontier workloads like World Labs' will shape its chip roadmap. 'Now that we have tangible proof of the possibilities, we want to do everything we can to accelerate the future,' Li wrote in a post announcing the deal. Li is known for building the ImageNet database, and she has argued that general intelligence requires a grounding in physics and in data beyond text. The acquisition gives AMD its own frontier research team focused on spatial and physical AI.