AMD buys World Labs in an $8.2 billion all-stock deal

Fei-Fei Li will join AMD’s leadership team as the acquisition deepens an existing hardware and model-research partnership.

AMD has agreed to buy World Labs in an all-stock deal valued at about $8.2 billion, giving the chipmaker a bigger stake in AI model research and in the hardware stack that supports it. Fei-Fei Li, World Labs’ co-founder, is set to become AMD’s executive vice president and chief scientist and will report to CEO Lisa Su once the transaction clears regulators and closes, expected by the end of the year. The companies say the move builds on an existing technical partnership: AMD had already invested in World Labs’ $1 billion round in February, and World Labs has been using Instinct accelerators and the ROCm software stack for training and inference. World Labs will keep doing model research, says it remains committed to widely accessible open models, and its Atlas model will feed future versions of Marble, its commercial 3D world product.