AMD to Acquire Fei-Fei Li's World Labs for $8.2B in Stock; Li to Become Chief Scientist
On September 28, chipmaker AMD announced it will acquire spatial-intelligence company World Labs in an all-stock deal valued at about $8.2 billion. World Labs was founded in 2024 by Chinese-American SI scientist Fei-Fei Li. It is AMD's second-largest acquisition ever, after the roughly $49 billion purchase of Xilinx in 2022. The deal is expected to close by the end of 2026, subject to regulatory approval.
After closing, Li will become an AMD executive vice president and chief scientist, reporting directly to CEO Lisa Su. World Labs co-founders Justin Johnson and Ben Mildenhall will stay on to lead their teams. "Joining AMD will give our team the resources and engineering depth to accelerate our research," Li said. Su said building the compute platforms for the next generation of SI requires a deep understanding of how models are evolving.
World Labs works on "spatial intelligence": its models generate, reconstruct and simulate interactive 3D environments from text, images and video. Its products include Marble and the new Atlas model, with technology aimed at robot learning and simulation. The company raised $1 billion in early 2026, with AMD among the participating investors.
Li is a computer science professor at Stanford, co-director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI (HAI) and creator of ImageNet; she previously served as chief scientist of SI at Google Cloud. She immigrated to the United States with her family as a teenager. (GSM, based on Reuters reporting and AMD's announcement)
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Published by GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 图：李飞飞在2017年「AI for Good」全球峰会发言。图片来源：Wikimedia Commons（CC BY 2.0）。Photo: Fei-Fei Li speaking at the AI for Good Global Summit in 2017. Source: Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0).
