AMD has agreed to buy Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs in an all-stock deal worth about $8.2 billion. Li will join AMD as executive vice president and chief scientist, reporting to CEO Lisa Su. The companies expect the deal to close by the end of 2026, subject to regulatory approval.
World Labs develops models that generate and work with 3D environments. Its first commercial product, Marble, lets users create interactive worlds from prompts. AMD says the acquisition will help it design AI hardware, software, and systems around the needs of new models and applications. The companies already had a partnership on model training and inference optimization, according to TechCrunch.
Why AMD wants the model team
World models can create simulated environments for applications such as robot training. TechCrunch reports that Nvidia already offers open-weight world models through Cosmos, while AMD’s public models have focused on text and video. Buying World Labs gives AMD a research team working on a different class of AI workload, along with Li in a role that reports directly to Su.
That could give AMD earlier information about the computing demands of spatial AI. It does not, by itself, show how Marble will run on AMD chips or what tools outside developers will receive. The announced plan says the World Labs team will continue its model research. It gives no performance results for the combined effort.
