AMD to buy Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs in $8.2 billion bet on ‘physical AI’

Classrooms must move more quickly from “solve this equation” to “decide what should be modelled, what assumptions are defensible, what data are missing, how the answer could fail, and how you would test it in the real world”.

Advanced Micro Devices said on Monday it would acquire Fei-Fei Li’s AI startup, World Labs, in an ⁠all-stock ​deal valued at $8.2 billion, a move that would give the chipmaker a foothold in research on physical AI systems that can understand and simulate the world.

The acquisition gives AMD access to ​research ​on spatial intelligence, an emerging field focused ⁠on enabling AI systems to model three-dimensional environments and physical interactions, which could shape future demand ‌for chips, software and AI infrastructure.

“We began a deep technical partnership with AMD last year, starting with model training and inference optimization on AMD GPUs,” Li said in a post on LinkedIn.

“As our teams worked together, we realized it would be a natural fit to bring ⁠together our AI ⁠ecosystem of software and hardware, foundation models, and applications.”

World Labs raised $1 billion in a funding ⁠round earlier ‌this year that included an investment from AMD.

The ​technology is aimed at helping AI ‌systems better understand and reason about the physical world, with potential uses in robotics, simulation, design and ‌other real-world applications.

AMD said ​it expects ​World Labs’ ​research to provide deeper insight into emerging AI workloads and help guide its technology roadmaps across ​hardware, software and systems.

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Li, a prominent ⁠AI researcher known for her work in computer vision, will join AMD as executive vice president and chief scientist after the ‌transaction ⁠closes. She will report to CEO Lisa Su. The deal is expected to close by the ​end of 2026.