AMD to Buy World Labs for $8.2 Billion
Fei-Fei Li will become AMD’s chief scientist, bringing the team behind Marble and Atlas closer to the chips that power its research.
AMD has agreed to buy World Labs (opens in a new tab), the spatial AI company led by Fei-Fei Li, in an all-stock deal valued at about $8.2 billion.
World Labs builds AI that creates and reconstructs 3D spaces, with uses ranging from virtual sets to robot training. AMD says bringing that research inside the company will help shape the hardware and software it develops for future AI systems.
The deal is expected to close by the end of 2026, subject to regulatory approval and other closing conditions. After it closes, Li will become AMD’s executive vice president and chief scientist, reporting to CEO Lisa Su.
In its own announcement (opens in a new tab), World Labs says Justin Johnson and Ben Mildenhall will continue leading the team alongside Li. The companies began working together last year to train models and improve how they run on AMD GPUs.
From 3D worlds to robot training
World Labs’ first product, Marble (opens in a new tab), turns text, images, and video into 3D worlds that people can explore. That gives creators a space to move through and choose camera angles within, rather than a single fixed image.
The company introduced its newer Atlas world model (opens in a new tab) on September 1. It combines text, images, video, and 3D information to generate scenes, reconstruct places, and simulate how a scene changes over time. World Labs says Atlas will power future versions of Marble and other products; it is entering early access with select partners.
In its robotics demonstrations, World Labs used phone video to reconstruct environments and generate the views a robot’s cameras would see as it moved through them. It also showed simulations of objects being handled, with variations in lighting, object placement, and motion to create more training examples.
A closer link to the hardware
AMD was already an investor in World Labs’ $1 billion funding round (opens in a new tab) announced in February. The acquisition would bring the model researchers and the chipmaker into the same company, giving AMD direct insight into what these systems need as they grow.
World Labs says the shared goal includes widely accessible open models alongside hardware, software, and platforms. The announcement does not set a release date or license for those models.
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