AMD to Acquire World Labs for $8.2 Billion

AMD will acquire World Labs for $8.2 billion, the companies said. The deal is expected to close before the end of the year, subject to regulatory approval.

World Labs develops deep learning models designed to understand the physical world. It was founded in 2024 by Fei-Fei Li, a Stanford computer science professor known for pioneering work on computer vision and the ImageNet database. Li will join AMD as executive vice president and chief scientist.

World Labs said the deal reflects the need for close collaboration across model research, systems and computing. AMD said understanding advanced workloads such as those developed at World Labs will inform its chip-making roadmap. The companies formed a partnership last year focused on inference optimization and training.

World Labs’ first product, Marble, is aimed at creating entertainment experiences and simulated environments for robot training. The acquisition could help AMD build an ecosystem for AI chips as it competes with Nvidia, which offers open-weight world models including Cosmos. AMD has made text- and video-based models available to the public.

World models can generate or sustain simulations of reality and are seen as useful for training robots, including autonomous vehicles, industrial robots and humanoids. The source article says synthetic data from such models may help address the shortage of useful training data for general-purpose robots.