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

AMD has agreed to acquire World Labs, the San Francisco spatial-intelligence company led by Fei-Fei Li, in an all-stock deal valued at about $8.2 billion, AMD announced on September 28, 2026. It is the clearest move yet by a chipmaker other than NVIDIA to own a model company whose output feeds robot training and simulation.

After closing, Li will join AMD as executive vice president and chief scientist, reporting to chair and CEO Lisa Su. AMD expects the deal to close by the end of 2026, subject to regulatory approvals and customary conditions.

What is AMD buying?

World Labs was founded at the start of 2024 and is run by Li as CEO. AMD’s release describes it as developing “spatial-intelligence models that generate, reconstruct and simulate interactive 3D environments from text, image and video inputs, as well as technology for robotic learning and simulation.” Its main product, Marble, launched in late 2025, builds navigable 3D worlds from text, image or video prompts. World Labs said co-founders Justin Johnson and Ben Mildenhall will keep leading the research team with Li after the deal.

The robotics link is already concrete. In December 2025 NVIDIA published a developer guide for exporting Marble scenes as Gaussian splats and collision meshes and loading them into Isaac Sim, NVIDIA’s robot simulator; by NVIDIA’s account, that cuts environment building from weeks of manual modelling to hours. After closing, the company at the generating end of that pipeline will be owned by NVIDIA’s main GPU rival.

Why would a chipmaker buy a world-model company?

AMD’s stated reason is workload insight. “As AI expands into reasoning, robotics, simulation and physical AI, the demands on compute infrastructure become more diverse,” the company said, and World Labs will give it “deeper insight into how workloads are evolving.” Li put the other side of the trade in a post about the deal: “Without having a focused hardware effort, AI is hobbled in efficiency. And scale.” The Next Web reports that the two companies began a technical partnership the previous year, training and running World Labs models on AMD GPUs.

The competitive frame is NVIDIA’s physical-AI stack: Cosmos world foundation models, Isaac Sim, GR00T robot models and, through its announced $12.9 billion Hugging Face deal, LeRobot, the open robot-learning library. AMD has had GPUs to sell into that market but no model layer of its own. World Labs gives it one in the category that investors have been backing hardest this year.

What does the deal not solve?

It does not give AMD a robot simulator, a robot policy model or a developer base on NVIDIA’s scale. Marble generates environments; robot teams still need physics, sensors and training loops, and many of them run that loop in Isaac Sim today. NVIDIA also invested in World Labs’ $1 billion round in February. Whether Marble stays hardware-neutral after closing, and how quickly its models are tuned for AMD Instinct GPUs, are the questions that matter to robot builders.

On price, the deal values World Labs at roughly 1.6 times the about $5 billion valuation Bloomberg reported it was discussing in January 2026, before the $1 billion round; the final valuation of that round was not disclosed. AMD is paying in stock, not cash, so the eventual value to World Labs holders will move with AMD’s share price until closing.