AMD is acquiring AI company World Labs in a deal worth more than $8 billion

AMD announced a planned all-stock acquisition of World Labs, the AI research lab co-founded by Dr. Fei-Fei Li, in a transaction valued at roughly $8.2 billion. The company said the deal should finalize before the end of the year and will bring World Labs’ research capabilities into AMD’s organization.

World Labs debuted in 2024 and rapidly reached a private valuation of $1 billion. In 2025 the startup released its first commercial offering, Marble, a world-generation model designed to create interactive 3D environments from textual prompts. AMD said the World Labs team will continue concentrating on advancing AI model research after the acquisition.

As part of the agreement, Fei-Fei Li will join AMD as executive vice president and chief scientist, reporting to AMD CEO Lisa Su. AMD framed the transaction as a way to deepen its understanding of how models are evolving and to better align hardware, software and systems development with emerging AI model requirements.

AMD positioned the deal as strengthening its ability to build compute platforms for next-generation AI, while Li said joining AMD was the right path for World Labs’ mission. The acquisition follows other large AI-related purchases this year, such as Nvidia’s announced nearly $13 billion acquisition of Hugging Face, reflecting broader industry moves to combine model development expertise with hardware and platform businesses.