AMD to Acquire AI Lab World Labs in $8.2B All-Stock Transaction

AMD announced on September 28, 2026, that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire World Labs, the San Francisco-based spatial-intelligence AI lab led by Dr. Fei-Fei Li, in an all-stock transaction valued at approximately $8.2 billion.

Deal Terms and Stated Rationale

AMD datelined its announcement from Santa Clara, California. The company said the acquisition will bring what it described as a world-class team of researchers and model experts to AMD, strengthening its ability to develop AI hardware, software and systems around the needs of emerging models and applications. AMD said World Labs’ expertise in developing advanced models will give it deeper insight into how workloads are evolving and help shape its future technology roadmaps, and described the transaction as advancing its strategy to deliver AI infrastructure for an open ecosystem.

World Labs announced the same day that it has signed a definitive agreement to join AMD. The lab said the research and technical breakthroughs it has achieved since its 2024 founding have given it a clear vision for AI’s potential to solve problems in the spatial and physical world, and that accelerating into that future requires scaling its efforts, scaling its reach and getting closer to the hardware.

“Building the compute platforms for the next generation of AI requires a deep understanding of how models are evolving,” AMD chair and CEO Dr. Lisa Su said in the company’s announcement. “Fei-Fei and the World Labs team bring exceptional research leadership and model expertise.”

Leadership Roles and Post-Close Plans

Following the close, Li will join AMD as executive vice president and chief scientist, reporting to Su. Justin Johnson and Ben Mildenhall will work with Li to continue leading the World Labs team as it joins AMD, forming what World Labs described as a world-leading frontier research organization. AMD said the World Labs team will continue to focus on advancing AI model research after the transaction closes.

AMD described World Labs, which is headquartered in San Francisco, as a developer of spatial-intelligence models that generate, reconstruct and simulate interactive 3D environments from text, image and video inputs, as well as technology for robotic learning and simulation.

“Advancing the next generation of AI technology requires close collaboration across model research, systems and compute,” Li said. “Joining AMD will give our team the resources and engineering depth to accelerate our research and help define the infrastructure needed for the next era of AI.”

Company Background and the Atlas Model

World Labs said it began a deep technical partnership with AMD in 2025, starting with model training and inference optimization on AMD GPUs, and that as the teams worked together they saw a natural fit in bringing together an AI ecosystem of software and hardware, foundation models and applications. In a post titled “To Seek a Newer World”, Li wrote that Su was an early investor in World Labs and that the companies had partnered since the lab’s earliest days.

Li wrote that she founded World Labs at the beginning of 2024 with co-founders Ben Mildenhall and Justin Johnson to build a frontier lab focused on spatial intelligence, guided by the belief that language alone is not sufficient for model development. She recounted a career that included the ImageNet work from her lab, serving as chief scientist of Google Cloud’s AI unit, and serving as the founding director of Stanford’s Human-Centered AI Institute. Li also wrote that, with the acquisition of SceniX, World Labs is building toward robotics simulation capability.

On September 1, 2026, World Labs introduced Atlas, which it described as an omni world model pretrained from scratch as a multimodal autoregressive diffusion transformer operating natively on text, images, video and 3D. World Labs said Atlas handles camera-controlled generation of up to one minute of video at 1440p resolution, spatial reconstruction from one to dozens of input images, space-time simulation, and image and 360-panorama generation. The company reported that in its own evaluations Atlas outperformed recent video models at camera-controlled generation and specialized open-source models at 3D reconstruction. Li characterized Atlas as a first-of-its-kind omni model architecture that addresses new camera view prediction.

World Labs said Atlas is entering early access with select partners and will power future versions of its Marble product. The lab said that together the organizations are committed to building an end-to-end open AI ecosystem spanning hardware, software, platforms and widely accessible open models. The transaction is expected to close by the end of 2026, subject to regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions.