AMD announced on September 28, 2026 that it entered into a definitive agreement to acquire World Labs, the San Francisco AI research company led by Dr. Fei-Fei Li. AMD values the all-stock transaction at approximately $8.2 billion. The agreement is signed, but the acquisition has not closed. AMD expects closing by the end of 2026, subject to regulatory approvals and other customary conditions.
World Labs develops spatial-intelligence models that generate, reconstruct and simulate interactive three-dimensional environments from text, image and video inputs, along with technology for robotic learning and simulation. AMD says its goal is to learn from the lab's evolving workloads as it designs future AI hardware, software and systems. That is a stated rationale, not evidence that World Labs' models have already been integrated with AMD's ROCm platform or Instinct GPUs. World Labs says it began a technical partnership with AMD last year focused on model training and inference optimization on AMD GPUs.
After the transaction closes, AMD says Li will become executive vice president and chief scientist, reporting to CEO Lisa Su. World Labs says Justin Johnson and Ben Mildenhall will continue leading its team with Li. The companies have not supplied a detailed integration timetable or promised specific new products. The practical thing to watch next is whether the required approvals arrive and the transaction closes on AMD's expected schedule.