AMD agreed to acquire World Labs, the startup founded by AI researcher Fei-Fei Li, in an all-stock deal worth $8.2 billion, TechCrunch reported. The deal is expected to close by the end of the year, subject to regulatory approval, according to Fortune.
World Labs builds spatial intelligence models, AI systems trained on video that generate, reconstruct and simulate interactive 3D environments meant to teach robots and self-driving systems how the physical world behaves, TechCrunch reported. Li will join AMD as executive vice president and chief scientist, according to both outlets.
Li said the deal would let her team "scale our efforts, widening our reach, and getting closer to the hardware," according to TechCrunch. AMD chief executive Lisa Su said the companies would "combine World Labs' deep expertise in AI and world models with AMD's compute leadership," Fortune reported.
The deal is AMD's second largest acquisition on record, after its roughly $50 billion purchase of Xilinx in 2022, Fortune reported. AMD and World Labs already had an inference partnership, and Nvidia already sells its own open-weight world models, called Cosmos, giving AMD grounds to compete directly in that market, according to TechCrunch.
For founders building on world models, the price tag is the signal: a 2-year-old startup with one shipped product just sold for more than most public companies are worth, and a chipmaker bought it to build hardware around it, not just software.