AMD to Acquire World Labs for $8.2B; Fei-Fei Li to Serve as EVP and Chief Scientist

AMD to Acquire World Labs for $8.2 Billion

On September 29, AMD announced it agreed to acquire San Francisco-based startup World Labs in an all-stock transaction valued at approximately $8.2 billion (about RMB 55.1 billion at current exchange rates).^[1]

World Labs was co-founded by Fei-Fei Li and others in 2024. It mainly develops "world models" that enable AI to generate or reconstruct interactive 3D environments from text, images, and video. In the future, this technology could be used for robot training, factory simulation, and scientific research.^[1]

Under the acquisition agreement, Fei-Fei Li will join AMD as executive vice president and chief scientist, reporting to Lisa Su.^[1][3]

Known as the "godmother of AI," Fei-Fei Li is widely known for creating ImageNet, a large-scale labeled image database. ImageNet helped demonstrate that larger data scale can significantly improve computer vision capabilities. Li later served as chief scientist of AI and machine learning at Google Cloud and became a founding co-director of Stanford University's Human-Centered AI Institute.^[1]

Earlier this month, World Labs launched a new AI model, Atlas, which can predict what the same scene would look like from a different camera angle using only a small number of 2D images. According to World Labs, this way of working can be compared to how large language models predict the next word in a sentence.^[1]

AMD CEO Lisa Su said in a press release that acquiring World Labs will allow AMD to gain a deeper understanding of how cutting-edge AI models are evolving, so it can develop the chips and computing systems needed to run these models.^[1]