AMD announced plans to buy World Labs for $8.2 billion. World Labs is a prominent developer of deep learning models designed to understand physical reality.
World Labs stated that AI development demands close collaboration across model research, systems, and compute. AMD noted that understanding frontier workloads from World Labs will shape its chip design roadmap.
Founder Fei-Fei Li will join AMD
Founder Fei-Fei Li will join AMD as executive vice president and chief scientist after the transaction. The two organizations previously formed an inference optimization and training partnership last year.
Li is a Stanford computer science professor and an artificial intelligence pioneer. She founded World Labs in 2024 to build deep learning models with a robust understanding of the physical world.
Li wrote that the partnership aims to scale technical breakthroughs beyond the laboratory. World Labs released a product named Marble for creating entertainment experiences and simulated environments for robot training.
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The acquisition helps AMD compete with Nvidia in creating an ecosystem for artificial intelligence chips. Nvidia already offers a suite of open-weight world models named Cosmos.
World models are viewed as vital for deploying generative AI on robotic platforms like autonomous vehicles and humanoids. Synthetic data from these models will help address the shortage of real-world training data.
The transaction is expected to close before the end of the year. The completion remains subject to regulatory approval.
