AMD is buying Fei-Fei Li's World Labs for $8.2 billion, and Li will report to Su
Lisa Su was one of World Labs' first investors, and now its founder will report to her.
AMD said on September 28, 2026 that it has agreed to buy World Labs, the AI lab Fei-Fei Li co-founded in 2024, in an all-stock deal valued at about $8.2 billion. AMD's release says Li will join as executive vice president and chief scientist, reporting to CEO Lisa Su.
It's a chipmaker buying a model lab, and both sides say that's the point. World Labs builds what it calls spatial-intelligence models, plus tools for training robots in simulation.
- Buyer
- AMD
- Target
- World Labs, led by Dr. Fei-Fei Li
- Price
- approximately $8.2 billion, all-stock
- Li's new role
- executive vice president and chief scientist, reporting to Dr. Lisa Su
- Expected close
- by the end of 2026, subject to regulatory approvals
Why a chip company wants a model lab
AMD's case is about knowing where workloads are headed. Su puts it plainly in the release.
Building the compute platforms for the next generation of AI requires a deep understanding of how models are evolving
So World Labs' research is meant to feed AMD's hardware roadmap. The lab's own post says the two companies started working together last year on model training and inference on AMD GPUs, and that co-founders Justin Johnson and Ben Mildenhall will keep leading the team with Li.
What Li says pushed her
Li wrote a longer account on her own newsletter, titled To Seek a Newer World. The part I didn't expect is how close she and Su already were. She says Su was an early investor in World Labs and calls her a great friend.
Without having a focused hardware effort, AI is hobbled in efficiency.
She argues that language alone isn't enough to build useful models, because "the universe isn't made up of words" (she says the company was built on that belief). Her post points to Atlas, the lab's recent model, which predicts new camera views from a set of 2D images, and to its purchase of SceniX for robot simulation.
And we are committed to providing the best open models and platforms for running AI end to end from hardware to software to models to the data platforms needed to fuel it all.
That promise of open models runs through both companies' posts. AMD's release says the deal advances its strategy to deliver AI infrastructure for an open ecosystem, though neither side says which World Labs models will be released openly or when.
Nothing changes for World Labs until the deal closes. AMD expects that by the end of 2026, once regulators sign off.