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AMD has signed a definitive agreement to acquire World Labs, the San Francisco spatial-intelligence company co-founded by Dr. Fei-Fei Li, in an all-stock transaction AMD values at approximately $8.2 billion. AMD expects the deal to close by the end of 2026, subject to regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions. Dr. Li will join AMD as executive vice president and chief scientist, reporting to Chair and CEO Dr. Lisa Su, and the World Labs team will continue to focus on AI model research after the close. What World Labs Brings World Labs develops spatial-intelligence models that generate, reconstruct, and simulate interactive 3D environments from text, image, and video inputs, along with technology for robotic learning and simulation. Its shipping product is Marble, a multimodal world model the company says lets anyone build spatially cohesive, high-fidelity, persistent 3D worlds from images, video, or text. Dr. Li founded the company with Justin Johnson, Ben Mildenhall, and Christoph Lassner, and AMD already held a stake: AMD Ventures first invested in World Labs’ Series B and took part again in the $1 billion round World Labs announced in February, which also drew Autodesk, Emerson Collective, Fidelity Management & Research Company, NVIDIA, and Sea, according to World Labs. AMD’s case for the deal is that as AI spreads into reasoning, robotics, simulation, and physical AI, the demands on compute infrastructure get more varied, and World Labs’ model expertise gives it a closer read on how those workloads are changing so it can shape its future technology roadmaps. AMD frames the acquisition as part of its strategy to deliver AI infrastructure for an open ecosystem. “Building the compute platforms for the next generation of AI requires a deep understanding of how models are evolving. 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,” said Dr. Lisa Su, chair and CEO, AMD. “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,” said Dr. Fei-Fei Li, co-founder and CEO, World Labs. AMD’s Second AI Acquisition in Two Months The deal follows AMD’s August agreement to acquire Taalas, the Toronto startup building silicon around a single model, and it lands as AMD positions the MI455X and the 72-GPU Helios rack against NVIDIA’s Vera Rubin generation. Taalas brought AMD an inference-silicon team; World Labs brings the model research side of the same problem, with Dr. Li running it as AMD’s chief scientist. AMD’s announcement does not address Marble or the World API as commercial products beyond saying the team will continue its model research.
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