AMD has agreed to buy World Labs, the spatial intelligence startup founded by Stanford computer scientist Fei-Fei Li, for $8.2 billion in stock, the companies said on Monday.
It is AMD’s second-largest acquisition, behind only its roughly $50 billion purchase of Xilinx in 2022. The deal is expected to close by the end of the year, subject to regulatory approval.
World Labs builds models that generate, reconstruct and simulate interactive 3D environments from text, images and video, along with tools for robot learning and simulation. Its first product, Marble, is pitched both at entertainment and at building simulated worlds in which to train robots.
Li, best known for creating the ImageNet dataset, will join AMD as executive vice president and chief scientist, reporting to chief executive Lisa Su.
The logic is competitive. Nvidia already offers a suite of open-weight world models through its Cosmos family, and models of this kind are becoming the training ground for robots and self-driving cars, TechCrunch noted. AMD had nothing comparable of its own.
The two companies are not strangers. They formed an inference and training partnership in 2025, and Li appeared at AMD’s CES presentation this year.
What AMD did not disclose is what it is buying in financial terms. There is no revenue figure for World Labs, no headcount and no comparison with its last private valuation.
An $8.2 billion all-stock price for a company with one product on the market is a bet on where demand for AI hardware goes next, paid in AMD shares whose value depends on that same bet.
