Advanced Micro Devices has agreed to acquire artificial intelligence research company World Labs in an all-stock transaction valued at approximately $8.2 billion, adding a prominent AI research team to the chipmaker as it expands its capabilities beyond computing hardware.
According to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, AMD entered into the merger agreement on September 26 and will pay World Labs stockholders in shares of AMD common stock, subject to customary adjustments.
The number of AMD shares to be issued has not yet been determined. The SEC filing states that it will be calculated using AMD's volume-weighted average share price over a 10-trading-day period shortly before the acquisition closes. AMD expects the transaction to be completed by the end of 2026, subject to regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions.
World Labs Brings Spatial AI Research to AMD
San Francisco-based World Labs is an AI research and product company focused on spatial intelligence — technology designed to enable AI systems to understand, generate and interact with three-dimensional environments. The company was founded by Stanford professor and computer vision researcher Fei-Fei Li alongside Justin Johnson, Ben Mildenhall and Christoph Lassner.
Its work differs in emphasis from AI systems primarily built around generating or processing text. World Labs develops models capable of reconstructing and simulating environments using inputs including text, images, video and 3D data. The technology is being developed for areas including content creation, simulation and robotics.
World Labs introduced its latest model, Atlas, in September. The company describes Atlas as a multimodal world model trained to work natively with text, images, video and 3D information. Its models are intended to maintain spatial consistency as they generate or reconstruct environments, an ability that could have applications where AI systems need to reason about physical spaces rather than operate solely on language or two-dimensional images.
Robotics is another area of the company's research. World Labs has been examining the use of simulated environments to train and evaluate robots before deploying them in real-world settings, where changes in lighting, object placement and other physical conditions can make training and testing more complicated.
AMD and World Labs Already Had Close Ties
The acquisition follows an existing financial and technical relationship between the two companies. AMD Ventures disclosed in March that it had invested in World Labs more than once, including participation in its Series B financing and a subsequent funding round.
World Labs announced in February that it had raised $1 billion in new funding from investors including AMD, Nvidia, Autodesk, Emerson Collective, Fidelity Management & Research Company and Sea. AMD said in March that the two companies were also working together on model training and inference optimization using AMD Instinct GPUs, alongside other technical and commercial collaboration.
Their relationship had already become visible outside investment activity. Li joined AMD Chair and CEO Lisa Su on stage during CES 2026, where World Labs was among several AI companies presented as users or partners of AMD technology.
The acquisition changes that relationship from investment and collaboration to planned ownership. Once the transaction closes, AMD says the World Labs team will continue its AI model research while becoming part of the chipmaker.
Fei-Fei Li to Become AMD Chief Scientist
Li will take on a senior role at AMD following completion of the deal. The company said she will become executive vice president and chief scientist, reporting directly to Su.
Li is a professor at Stanford University and is widely known for her work in computer vision. She led the creation of ImageNet, a large-scale visual database that became an important resource in the development and evaluation of computer vision systems.
Dr. Lisa Su, chair and CEO of AMD, said: “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. 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.”
Dr. Fei-Fei Li, co-founder and CEO, World Labs, stated: “Advancing the next generation of AI technology requires close collaboration across model research, systems and compute. Joining AMD will give our team the resources and engineering depth to accelerate our research and help define the infrastructure needed for the next era of AI.”
Bringing researchers who build AI models inside AMD could give the company another source of information about the computing requirements of emerging workloads.
AMD Broadens Its AI Strategy
AMD has been expanding its presence across several layers of AI infrastructure rather than concentrating solely on individual processors. Its portfolio includes Instinct data center GPUs, EPYC server CPUs, networking technology and software used to run AI workloads.
World Labs adds model research to that mix. The acquisition therefore gives AMD direct ownership of a company developing the type of AI workloads that its computing products may eventually be expected to train and run.
The transaction also comes as semiconductor companies compete for a larger role in the infrastructure supporting AI development. Nvidia remains a major participant in AI accelerators and was itself listed by World Labs as an investor in the startup's February funding round. AMD, meanwhile, has been increasing investment in AI companies while developing successive generations of its Instinct accelerators and related infrastructure.
At approximately $8.2 billion, the World Labs agreement represents a substantial commitment by AMD to a company working outside its traditional semiconductor design business.
