AMD Bets $8.2 Billion on 'World Models' and a Star Scientist
AI-generated image · US National Wire
The chipmaker is acquiring World Labs to challenge Nvidia's AI ecosystem, bringing in Fei-Fei Li to lead research into spatial intelligence.
AMD has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire World Labs, a startup focused on deep learning models that understand physical reality, in an all-stock deal valued at approximately $8.2 billion. According to reporting from TechCrunch and The Verge, the acquisition is intended to help AMD compete with rival Nvidia by building an ecosystem of AI-specific chips, software, and platforms.
As part of the deal, World Labs co-founder and CEO Fei-Fei Li—a Stanford professor and computer vision pioneer known for the ImageNet database—will join AMD as executive vice president and chief scientist. Li will report directly to AMD CEO Lisa Su. Other World Labs leaders, including Justin Johnson and Ben Mildenhall, will also join the company to lead the research organization, as detailed by World Labs.
World Labs was founded in 2024 to develop models capable of reasoning about data beyond text, arguing that general intelligence requires a grounding in physics. The company's first product, Marble, launched in 2025 as a tool for creating interactive 3D environments via prompts, which can be used for entertainment or training robots. TechCrunch notes that such "world models" are critical for synthetic data generation, which is necessary for the development of autonomous vehicles and humanoid robots from companies such as Figure and Tesla.
AMD and World Labs have maintained a close relationship since forming an inference optimization-and-training partnership last year. AMD stated that understanding these frontier workloads will help shape its chip-making roadmap, while Su noted that developing next-generation compute platforms requires a deep understanding of how models evolve. In a post on her Substack, Li stated that joining AMD was the necessary path to scale technical breakthroughs beyond the lab and get closer to the hardware.
While Nvidia already offers a suite of open-weight world models called Cosmos, TechCrunch reports that AMD has previously only offered video- and text-based models to the public. Pending regulatory approval, the deal is slated to close before the end of the year.