AMD announced today that it’s acquiring World Labs, an AI research lab co-founded by the prominent researcher Dr. Fei-Fei Li, in an all-stock deal worth approximately $8.2 billion. World Labs launched in 2024 and was valued at $1 billion in a matter of months. The startup launched its first commercial product, a world generation model called Marble that lets users make interactive 3D worlds from a prompt, in 2025.
The deal is expected to close by the end of the year. Li will become EVP and chief scientist at AMD, reporting to AMD CEO Lisa Su, while the World Labs team will “continue to focus on advancing AI model research.” AMD also notes that the acquisition will strengthen “its ability to develop AI hardware, software and systems around the needs of emerging models and applications.”
“Just like I knew it was time to do a startup to jumpstart the work of creating foundation models beyond LLMs and achieve the most impact in AI, it’s again very clear that the right path for myself and World Labs is to continue our mission as a part of AMD,” Li says in a post on her Substack. “Together we’re committed to keep pushing the frontier of AI to solve real problems, and doing so openly with the community and the entire ecosystem.”
“Building the compute platforms for the next generation of AI requires a deep understanding of how models are evolving,” Su says in a statement. “Fei-Fei and the World Labs team bring exceptional research leadership and model expertise. Together, we can use that insight to develop the hardware, software and systems that will power the next generation of AI and strengthen the open AI ecosystem.”
The World Labs deal is just the latest multi-billion dollar AI-related acquisition as of late, with Nvidia announcing earlier this month that it would be acquiring Hugging Face for nearly $13 billion.