AMD Acquires Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs for $8.2B to Build AI World Models

AMD has officially agreed to acquire San Francisco-based startup World Labs in an all-stock transaction valued at approximately $8.2B. Stanford professor and AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li, who founded the startup, is joining AMD as chief scientist and executive vice president. World Labs specializes in developing "world models" designed to simulate 3D environments, allowing intelligent software agents to train in physics-aware digital spaces. The deal marks the second-largest acquisition in AMD's history, sitting just behind the roughly $50B it paid for Xilinx in 2022. AMD plans to keep World Labs operating separately from its core chipmaking business until the transaction officially closes later this year. The research generated by the lab will directly inform what AMD's future AI chips need to be capable of handling years in advance. "Intelligent agents, whether it's robots or vehicles or even tools, can learn inside very-rich physics-aware digital worlds before they even need to be deployed into the real one, making them much safer." — Fei-Fei Li