AMD agrees to acquire World Labs for $8.2 billion — TechCrunch

AMD has agreed to acquire World Labs, a developer of deep learning models designed to understand physical reality. The deal is valued at $8.2 billion, TechCrunch reports. The acquisition is expected to close by the end of the year, subject to regulatory approvals.

Fei-Fei Li will join AMD

After the deal closes, World Labs founder Fei-Fei Li will take on the roles of executive vice president and chief scientist at AMD. Li is a professor of computer science at Stanford University and one of the pioneers of artificial intelligence, particularly computer vision. She contributed to the creation of the ImageNet database and related competitions.

In 2024, Li founded World Labs to develop models intended to gain a deeper understanding of the real world. In her view, artificial general intelligence requires grounding in physical reality and the ability to understand and analyze data beyond text.

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World models and AI chips

The companies had already worked together: last year, they formed a partnership to optimize model inference and training. Fei-Fei Li was also a guest at AMD's CES presentation earlier this year. World Labs said that AI development requires close interaction among model research, systems, and computing resources. AMD noted that understanding advanced workloads such as World Labs' developments will influence its chip manufacturing roadmap.

World Labs' first product, Marble, is positioned for creating entertainment projects and simulated environments for training robots. World models can generate synthetic data for training robotic platforms, from autonomous cars to industrial and humanoid robots. The acquisition will likely help AMD compete with Nvidia in building an ecosystem of specialized AI chips: Nvidia already offers the open Cosmos world models, while AMD has publicly presented only text and video models.