AMD ACQUIRES FEI-FEI LI'S WORLD LABS FOR $8.2BN

AMD has agreed to acquire World Labs, the start-up founded by AI researcher Dr Fei-Fei Li, in a deal worth $8.2 billion, the two companies said. Li will join AMD as chief scientist and executive vice-president, reporting directly to AMD chair and chief executive Dr Lisa Su. World Labs, which describes itself as a "spatial intelligence company", employs around 70 people who are expected to join AMD as part of the acquisition. Its flagship product, Marble, generates 3D virtual worlds from image or text prompts. The deal is expected to close by the end of the year.

Li co-founded World Labs in 2024 alongside AI researchers Ben Mildenhall and Justin Johnson, and previously served as founding director of the Stanford Human-Centred AI Institute. She said in a blog post that the San Francisco-based company began a "deep technical partnership" with AMD last year, adding that the two organisations realised it would be a "natural fit" to combine their software, hardware and foundation-model capabilities. Su was an early investor in World Labs. Earlier this year, World Labs raised $1 billion in a funding round backed by Nvidia, AMD and Autodesk at a reported $5 billion valuation, with Autodesk contributing $200 million and taking an advisory role in the company.

AMD said understanding frontier computing workloads of the kind developed at World Labs would shape its chip-making roadmap, while World Labs said AI development required close collaboration across model research, systems and computing. The acquisition follows a period in which physical AI systems, including those used in autonomous driving and factory automation, have demonstrated commercial applications. Li has also been involved in backing other AI ventures, including a $400 million funding round for the robotics company Generalist, which included participation from Nvidia's venture arm NVentures, Jeff Bezos's Bezos Expeditions and Zoom chief executive Eric Yuan.