AMD Acquires World Labs for $8.2 Billion in All-Stock Deal

Quick Facts

• AMD agreed to acquire World Labs for approximately $8.2 billion in an all-stock transaction expected to close by end of 2026.
• World Labs founder Fei-Fei Li will join AMD as Executive Vice President and Chief Scientist, reporting directly to CEO Lisa Su.
• The deal values World Labs at more than 1.6x its last known $5 billion valuation from a February 2026 funding round.

Advanced Micro Devices agreed on Sept. 26 to acquire World Labs Technologies for approximately $8.2 billion in AMD common stock, the chipmaker's second-largest acquisition on record behind its $50 billion purchase of Xilinx in 2022.

World Labs is a San Francisco-based spatial intelligence company with roughly 103 employees. It builds Large World Models designed to perceive, generate, and interact with three-dimensional environments, with applications in robotics, autonomous vehicles, and physical simulation.

The number of AMD shares to be issued will be calculated using the daily volume-weighted average price over the ten consecutive trading days ending two trading days before closing. The deal is subject to regulatory approvals and is expected to close before year-end.

Fei-Fei Li, who co-founded World Labs in 2024, will join AMD as Executive Vice President and Chief Scientist. She will report directly to CEO Lisa Su. The full World Labs team will transfer to AMD as part of the transaction.

Li is best known for building the ImageNet database and the machine learning competitions it spawned. She has argued that general AI requires a grounded understanding of physics, not just patterns in two-dimensional data. AMD said World Labs will continue its AI research under the new ownership structure.

Products and recent milestones

World Labs launched its flagship model, Atlas, in September 2026. Atlas is a multimodal model trained natively on text, images, video, and 3D spatial data. It can generate virtual replicas of physical spaces from a handful of photos, simulate moving objects, and produce depth data useful for robotics navigation.

The company's first commercial product, Marble, lets users generate persistent 3D worlds from images, video, or text. Marble carries public pricing from a free tier to $20, $35, and $95 monthly plans, plus enterprise pricing.

AMD and World Labs had an existing relationship before the acquisition. At CES earlier this year, Su invited Li on stage and announced that Marble achieved a speed increase of more than 4x after optimization on AMD's MI325X chips. AMD had also invested in World Labs' most recent $1 billion funding round, which closed in February 2026 and valued the company at $5 billion.

What both sides said

Su said building competitive compute platforms requires a close understanding of how models are developing. In a post on X, she wrote that AMD and World Labs would combine model expertise with compute leadership to strengthen the open AI ecosystem.

Li framed the deal as a way to scale technical breakthroughs beyond the lab. She has pointed to robotics as a primary use case, saying that intelligent agents can learn inside physics-aware digital worlds before deployment in the real one, which she argued makes them safer.

World Labs said in a statement that AI development required close collaboration across model research, systems, and compute, a gap the merger is meant to close.

Funding history and deal premium

World Labs raised $230 million in September 2024, then $1 billion in February 2026. Investors in its latest round included AMD, Autodesk, Emerson Collective, Fidelity Management and Research Company, NVIDIA, and Sea. Angel investors include Eric Schmidt. The $8.2 billion price represents a premium of more than 60 percent over the $5 billion valuation set just seven months before the deal was announced.

AMD shares were roughly flat in after-hours trading following the announcement.

Read more: AMD acquires world model developer World Labs for $8.2B