AMD Buys Fei-Fei Li's World Labs for $8.2 Billion

A speaker in a dark blazer with arms outstretched on a conference stage against a pink backdrop — AMD agreed on September 28, 2026 to buy World Labs, the AI startup founded by Fei-Fei Li, in an $8.2 billion all-stock deal. Source: South China Morning Post

Quick answer: AMD agreed on September 28, 2026 to buy World Labs, the AI startup founded by Fei-Fei Li that builds world models for generating and simulating 3D environments, in an all-stock deal valued at about $8.2 billion. Li becomes AMD's executive vice president and chief scientist, and the deal is expected to close by the end of 2026, subject to regulatory approval.

TLDR

AMD announced the $8.2 billion all-stock acquisition on September 28, with closing expected by the end of 2026 subject to regulatory approval.
Fei-Fei Li becomes AMD's executive vice president and chief scientist, reporting to CEO Lisa Su, while World Labs keeps building models inside AMD.
The price is roughly 64% above the valuation of about $5 billion reported when World Labs raised $1 billion in February from investors including AMD and Nvidia.

AMD has agreed to buy World Labs, the two-year-old AI startup founded by Stanford computer scientist Fei-Fei Li, in an all-stock deal valued at about $8.2 billion, making it the second chipmaker in four weeks to pay billions for an AI model developer.

AMD is paying $8.2 billion in stock for a startup that makes 3D world models

World Labs builds what the industry calls world models: systems that generate, reconstruct and simulate interactive 3D environments from text, images and video, along with tools for training robots in simulation. Its commercial product, Marble, turns a prompt or a photo into an explorable 3D scene. According to AMD's announcement, Li will report directly to Su once the deal closes, and co-founders Justin Johnson and Ben Mildenhall will keep leading the research team, World Labs said.

Bar chart showing World Labs valuation rising from about $1 billion at its 2024 Series A to about $5 billion in February 2026 and $8.2 billion in AMD's September 2026 acquisition, beside Nvidia's $12.9 billion Hugging Face deal — World Labs went from launch to an $8.2 billion sale in about two years. Chart: Santage. Source: AMD press release, September 28, 2026; World Labs funding announcements.

“Building the compute platforms for the next generation of AI requires a deep understanding of how models are evolving.”
Lisa Su, Chair and CEO, AMD, AMD to Acquire World Labs to Advance the Future of AI Compute, September 28, 2026

AMD and World Labs deal terms

Deal value	About $8.2 billion, all stock
Announced	September 28, 2026
Expected close	End of 2026, subject to regulatory approval
Fei-Fei Li's new role	AMD executive vice president and chief scientist
World Labs funding before the deal	About $1.23 billion ($230 million in 2024, $1 billion in February 2026)

Source: AMD press release, September 28, 2026; World Labs funding announcements.

A chipmaker is buying early sight of the next AI workloads

AMD designs accelerators years before customers run them, and the risk in that cycle is building for the wrong kind of model. Text large language models set the design targets for the current generation of AI chips. World models that render video and 3D scenes, and the robotics simulations built on them, stress memory and bandwidth differently, and AMD now gets to watch those workloads take shape inside its own research group. World Labs already ran a technical partnership on AMD GPUs before the deal, which Li cited as a reason to join.

The purchase also mirrors Nvidia's. Nvidia signed its $12.93 billion deal for Hugging Face on September 3 to keep the largest open-model hub close to its hardware, and it has its own world-model family, Cosmos. With AMD now owning a world-model lab, both leading GPU makers hold a model research arm in the category investors expect to drive physical AI and robotics.

To Seek a Newer World
Fei-Fei Li (@drfeifei) September 28, 2026

Source: @drfeifei

Because AMD is paying in shares, World Labs' backers, a group that includes Nvidia from the February round, stand to be paid in AMD stock. For Li, whose ImageNet dataset helped start the deep learning era, the move puts one of the field's best-known researchers in the chief scientist seat at the company trying hardest to break Nvidia's hold on AI compute.

In short: AMD is buying World Labs for about $8.2 billion in stock, roughly 64% above the valuation reported at the startup's February 2026 round, and making founder Fei-Fei Li its chief scientist. It is the second chipmaker purchase of an AI model company in four weeks, after Nvidia's $12.93 billion Hugging Face deal, and gives AMD an in-house view of world-model and robotics workloads as it plans future chips.

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