AMD has agreed to buy World Labs, the AI start-up founded by Stanford researcher Fei-Fei Li, for about $8.2 billion in an all-stock deal. The acquisition is AMD's second-largest ever, and Li will join the chipmaker as chief scientist and an executive vice president.
AMD is paying about $8.2 billion in an all-stock transaction to acquire World Labs, the San Francisco AI lab founded by Fei-Fei Li. The deal, announced on September 28, pushes the chip designer further beyond hardware and into AI model development.
AMD's second-largest deal on record
For AMD, the purchase is its second-largest on record, trailing only the roughly $50 billion it paid for Xilinx in 2022. AMD chief executive Lisa Su said the acquisition would give the company insight into how AI workloads are evolving and help shape its future technology road maps. Li will become AMD's chief scientist and an executive vice president once the deal closes, and the company plans to keep World Labs separate from its chipmaking business until then.
World Labs' spatial-intelligence bet
Li founded World Labs in 2024 alongside co-founders Justin Johnson, Christoph Lassner, and Ben Mildenhall, building what the industry calls "spatial intelligence" — AI models that generate and reason about 3D environments. The startup raised a $230 million seed round in September 2024, then a $1 billion equity round in February 2026 that AMD itself joined alongside Nvidia and Autodesk. Total funding before the acquisition reached roughly $1.23 billion. Its Marble model launched in November 2025, followed by the Atlas model in September 2026, and the lab also picked up robotics-simulation startup SceniX in July 2026.
Part of a broader AI shopping spree
The World Labs deal follows a string of AMD acquisitions, including the $4.9 billion purchase of ZT Systems in 2025 and the $665 million acquisition of Finnish AI firm Silo AI in 2024. AMD also bought inference technology company Taalas in August 2026. In a social media post, Li called Su a "great friend". The spending spree comes as rivals move similarly: OpenAI paid about $6.4 billion for Jony Ive's startup io, Nvidia spent a combined $33 billion on Groq and Hugging Face, and Meta put $14 billion into a stake in Scale AI.
Sources: CNBC, Financial Times (snippet-based), Crypto Briefing
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