AMD to buy Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs for US$8.2 billion in stock

Advanced Micro Devices agreed Monday to acquire World Labs, the San Francisco AI lab founded by Stanford researcher and ImageNet pioneer Fei-Fei Li, for about US$8.2 billion in an all-stock deal expected to close by year-end subject to regulatory approvals.

World Labs builds spatial-intelligence “world models” that generate, reconstruct and simulate interactive three-dimensional environments from text, images and video — technology researchers see as key to robotics and physically grounded AI. After closing, Li will join AMD as executive vice-president and chief scientist, reporting to chair and CEO Lisa Su. AMD said the lab’s research will help shape future hardware, software and systems for an open AI ecosystem.

The purchase is AMD’s second-largest on record after the roughly US$50-billion Xilinx deal in 2022. It comes as rivals spend heavily on talent and model labs: OpenAI’s device deal with Jony Ive’s io, Nvidia’s moves around Groq and Hugging Face, and Meta’s Scale AI investment. AMD plans to keep World Labs’ research focus distinct from chipmaking until the transaction closes.