AMD to Buy World Labs in $8.2 Billion AI Deal, Fei-Fei Li to Join as Chief Scientist

The two companies confirmed the agreement, which values the physical-reality-focused AI developer at $8.2 billion. As part of the transaction, World Labs founder Fei-Fei Li will take the title of executive vice president and chief scientist at AMD.

World Labs framed the tie-up as a response to how AI research is conducted, saying progress now requires "close collaboration across model research, systems and compute." AMD said exposure to frontier workloads of the kind developed at World Labs will inform how it designs its future chips.

The pair are not strangers. AMD and World Labs struck an inference optimization and training partnership last year, and the relationship has stayed close since — Li appeared as a guest during AMD's CES presentation earlier this year.

Li is a Stanford University computer science professor and widely regarded as a pioneer in artificial intelligence, particularly computer vision. Her work building the ImageNet database and the competitions it inspired helped reshape the field. She founded World Labs in 2024 to build deep learning models with a stronger grasp of the physical world, arguing that genuine general intelligence needs a grounding in physics and the capacity to reason about data beyond text.

In a post announcing the deal, Li said the partnership grew out of a wish to push World Labs' technical breakthroughs past the laboratory stage. "Now that we have tangible proof of the possibilities, we want to do everything we can to accelerate the future," she said.