World Labs’ AI research team, including co-founder and CEO Fei-Fei Li, is set to join AMD under an all-stock acquisition valued at about USD 8.2 billion (about PHP 515 billion).
The transaction is expected to close by the end of 2026, subject to regulatory approvals and other customary conditions. AMD’s regulatory filing shows the final number of shares to be issued will depend on its share price shortly before the deal closes.
Li will become AMD executive vice president and chief scientist, reporting directly to Chair and CEO Lisa Su. World Labs co-founders Justin Johnson and Ben Mildenhall will continue working with Li to lead the research team after it joins AMD.
World Labs develops spatial-intelligence models that generate, reconstruct, and simulate interactive 3D environments from text, images, and video. The company also works on robotic learning and simulation.
Its latest model, Atlas, was introduced on September 1 and was trained to work natively with text, images, video, and 3D inputs. World Labs says the model can use those inputs to build a shared spatial context and generate views that remain consistent with the environment it has already observed.
World Labs began working with AMD in 2025 on model training and inference optimization using AMD GPUs. AMD was also among the investors in a USD 1 billion funding round World Labs announced in February.
AMD said bringing model researchers into the company will give its hardware and software teams more insight into how AI workloads are developing. “Building the compute platforms for the next generation of AI requires a deep understanding of how models are evolving,” Su said.
The acquisition follows AMD’s expansion into other parts of the AI computing stack. AMD completed its acquisition of ZT Systems in March 2025, adding rack-scale systems design and customer-enablement teams, and agreed in August 2026 to acquire Taalas, which develops specialized silicon for AI inference.
World Labs adds model research to that mix, with its team remaining focused on AI models after the transaction closes.