AMD to acquire Fei-Fei Li's World Labs for $8.2 billion, naming her chief scientist

AMD will buy World Labs, the spatial-intelligence startup founded by Fei-Fei Li in 2024, for $8.2 billion, with Li joining as EVP and chief scientist reporting to CEO Lisa Su; the deal, expected to close by year-end pending regulatory approval, aims to narrow…

AMD announced on September 28, 2026 that it has agreed to acquire World Labs, the spatial-intelligence and world-model startup founded in 2024 by Fei-Fei Li, for $8.2 billion. The Verge and The Decoder describe the deal as all-stock; TechCrunch, Latent Space and Ars Technica report the same $8.2 billion figure without specifying structure. The deal is expected to close by year-end (the end of 2026), pending regulatory approval. Li, the Stanford professor known for ImageNet, will join AMD as executive vice president and chief scientist, reporting directly to CEO Lisa Su, while the team continues model research. Ars Technica reports World Labs was co-founded with Justin Johnson, Christoph Lassner and Ben Mildenhall and raised $230 million, including AMD investment; The Decoder says it has about 70 employees, and The Verge notes it reached a $1 billion valuation within months of launch. Its products include Marble, released in 2025, which generates interactive 3D worlds from prompts (described by Ars Technica as Gaussian-splat 3D space generation) for entertainment experiences and robot training, and Atlas, which Latent Space describes as predicting new camera views from sparse 2D images by combining generative models with multiview geometry, while The Decoder says it generates and simulates 3D scenes from a few images; World Labs also acquired SceniX for robotics simulation. AMD says exposure to these workloads will shape its chip roadmap as it competes with Nvidia, which offers the Cosmos world-model stack, bundles AI chips with models and services, and is the leader in synthetic training data for robotics; Ars Technica notes AMD currently lacks a direct competitor to Cosmos despite its open-source Micro-World model. Nvidia separately plans to acquire Hugging Face for nearly $13 billion. Separately, Latent Space reports Anthropic launched Claude Sonnet 5.5, claiming it is more than 30% faster and up to 30% cheaper than Sonnet 5; it now powers the free tier on claude.ai, with Haiku 5.5 expected in the coming weeks.

• AMD will acquire World Labs for $8.2 billion; The Verge and The Decoder describe the deal as all-stock, while TechCrunch, Latent Space and Ars Technica do not specify the structure.
• The deal is expected to close by year-end (end of 2026), pending regulatory approval.
• Fei-Fei Li will join AMD as executive vice president and chief scientist, reporting directly to CEO Lisa Su; the team continues model research.
• World Labs was founded in 2024 by Fei-Fei Li with Justin Johnson, Christoph Lassner and Ben Mildenhall (Ars Technica).
• World Labs raised $230 million including AMD investment (Ars Technica), has about 70 employees (The Decoder), and reached a $1 billion valuation within months of launch (The Verge).
• Marble, released in 2025, generates interactive 3D worlds from prompts — described by Ars Technica as Gaussian-splat 3D space generation — for entertainment and robot training.
• Atlas: Latent Space describes it as predicting new camera views from sparse 2D images by combining generative models with multiview geometry; The Decoder says it generates and simulates 3D scenes from a few images.
• World Labs acquired SceniX to build robotics simulation capability (Latent Space).