AMD has entered a definitive agreement to acquire World Labs, the AI research laboratory co-founded by Dr Fei-Fei Li, in an all-stock transaction valued at approximately $8.2bn.
The deal is expected to complete by the end of this year, pending regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions. It is designed to give AMD greater capability in developing AI hardware, software and systems shaped by the requirements of next-generation models and applications.
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World Labs, headquartered in San Francisco, builds spatial-intelligence models that can generate, reconstruct and simulate interactive 3D environments using text, image and video inputs. The company also develops technology for robotic learning and simulation.
AMD chair and CEO Lisa Su said: “Building the compute platforms for the next generation of AI requires a deep understanding of how models are evolving.
“Fei-Fei and the World Labs team bring exceptional research leadership and model expertise. Together, we can use that insight to develop the hardware, software and systems that will power the next generation of AI and strengthen the open AI ecosystem.”
The two organisations already have an established working relationship.
World Labs entered into a technical partnership with AMD last year, collaborating on model training and inference optimisation on AMD graphics processing units (GPUs). That collaboration ultimately led both sides to conclude that a full combination was a natural next step.
World Labs CEO Dr Fei-Fei Li said: “Advancing the next generation of AI technology requires close collaboration across model research, systems and compute.
“Joining AMD will give our team the resources and engineering depth to accelerate our research and help define the infrastructure needed for the next era of AI.”
Once the transaction closes, Dr Li will take on the newly created role of executive vice president and chief scientist at AMD, reporting directly to Su. Justin Johnson and Ben Mildenhall will continue to lead the World Labs team alongside Dr Li as it integrates into AMD’s operations.
AMD has positioned the acquisition within a wider effort to build an open AI ecosystem. As AI workloads diversify across areas such as reasoning, robotics and simulation, the chipmaker said World Labs’ expertise in advanced model development would offer deeper insight into shifting compute demands and help shape future product roadmaps.
The World Labs agreement marks the second major AI-focused acquisition AMD has disclosed in recent weeks. In August 2026, the company reached a definitive agreement to buy Taalas, a Toronto-based firm founded in 2023 that develops specialised AI inference silicon.
Taalas’s technology is designed to optimise inference dataflows, targeting the compute and memory bottlenecks that can affect general-purpose chip architectures.
Also last month, AMD signed a memorandum of understanding with the University of Oxford to support open academic AI research carried out by the British Open-ended Learning and Discovery Lab, known as BOLD. The initiative draws on researchers from the University of Oxford, University College London and Imperial College London, with planned work spanning compute access, software optimisation and open-source development.
