AMD Acquires World Labs; Fei-Fei Li to Join as Chief Scientist

AMD has signed a definitive agreement to acquire World Labs, the spatial intelligence startup founded by Stanford professor Dr. Fei-Fei Li, in a move that underscores the growing convergence of frontier AI research and semiconductor hardware development. The transaction, announced by World Labs, is expected to close by the end of 2026, subject to regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions. Financial terms were not disclosed.

World Labs, founded in 2024, has focused on advancing AI's capacity to understand and operate in the spatial and physical world—a domain that demands both sophisticated foundation models and substantial compute resources. Since its inception, the company has pursued research and technical breakthroughs that it says have given it a clear vision for AI's potential to solve problems beyond text and images. According to the company, accelerating toward that future requires scaling its efforts, expanding its reach, and moving closer to the hardware layer.

The acquisition follows a deepening technical partnership between the two organizations that began last year, initially centered on model training and inference optimization running on AMD GPUs. As the engineering teams collaborated more closely, both sides concluded that combining World Labs' AI ecosystem—spanning software, hardware, foundation models, and applications—with AMD's semiconductor platform would be a natural strategic fit.

As part of the deal, Dr. Fei-Fei Li will join AMD as Executive Vice President and Chief Scientist, reporting directly to AMD Chairman and CEO Dr. Lisa Su. World Labs co-founders Justin Johnson and Ben Mildenhall will continue to lead the World Labs team alongside Li as the unit integrates into AMD to form what the companies describe as a world-leading frontier research organization. Together, they have committed to building an end-to-end open AI ecosystem spanning hardware, software, platforms, and widely accessible open models.

The acquisition signals a broader trend in the AI industry: the tightening integration of frontier research labs with chipmakers as competition intensifies around compute infrastructure. By bringing a prominent AI research team in-house, AMD is positioning itself to compete more directly with rivals that have made similar moves to vertically integrate AI talent and silicon. For World Labs, joining AMD provides the hardware proximity and scale that the startup views as essential to pushing the boundaries of spatial intelligence and physical-world AI applications.