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AMD announced an agreement to acquire World Labs, the San Francisco AI lab building 3D 'world models' founded by researcher Fei-Fei Li, in an all-stock deal valued at roughly $8.2 billion. Li will join AMD as chief scientist and executive vice president, while World Labs will operate separately from AMD's chip business until the deal closes later this year.
AMD announced an $8.2 billion deal to acquire World Labs, the AI startup founded by Fei-Fei Li that builds deep learning models focused on understanding physical reality. Li will join AMD as executive vice president and chief scientist, deepening a partnership the two companies formed last year around inference optimization and training.
World Labs has signed a definitive agreement to be acquired by AMD, with the deal expected to close by the end of 2026 pending regulatory approval. Founder Fei-Fei Li will join AMD as Executive Vice President and Chief Scientist reporting to CEO Lisa Su, while co-founders Justin Johnson and Ben Mildenhall continue leading the World Labs team within AMD.
British startup Worldmodeldata, advised by AI researcher Yann LeCun, is packaging controller inputs and gameplay footage from video game studios into datasets meant to train 'world models'—AI systems designed to understand physical cause and effect. The company positions itself as a broker that curates this data for AI labs, rather than collecting it directly from its own gaming platforms.
At the All In conference, AMI Labs co-founder Michael Rabbatt declined to detail his company's product roadmap for its spatial-intelligence 'world model' technology, saying only that AMI will discuss plans 'when we're ready.' World Labs, maker of the Marble platform, has shown demos in gaming, media and CGI but has not clarified a clear commercial direction, and even data supplier Physicl's CEO Alex de Vigan says he doesn't know exactly how his company's data is being used.