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Lisa Su Acquires Fei-Fei Li’s World Model for 55 Billion Yuan as the Two AI Queens Join Forces
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AMD has announced an all-stock acquisition of World Labs, a company founded by Fei-Fei Li in early 2024, for approximately $8.2 billion. The two parties have signed a definitive agreement, and the transaction is expected to be completed by the end of 2026, although it remains subject to regulatory approval. After the transaction, Li will serve as AMD’s executive vice president and chief scientist, reporting directly to CEO Lisa Su.
World Labs was co-founded by Fei-Fei Li, Ben Mildenhall, and Justin Johnson. The company focuses on “spatial intelligence,” which enables AI to understand the locations of objects, spatial structures, and changes in the environment. The team consists of approximately 70 people and covers fields including computer vision, large models, systems architecture, and graphics. In July, the company acquired SceniX, adding robotics simulation capabilities.
World Labs is developing models that can generate, reconstruct, and simulate interactive three-dimensional environments from text, images, and video. Its Atlas model combines generative models with multi-view geometry, enabling it to predict novel viewpoints from a limited number of images and outperform specialized models on certain tasks. These technologies may be used in robot training, healthcare, entertainment, real estate, and architecture, but they do not yet capture all of the physical laws of the real world.
Model scale, computational efficiency, and hardware compatibility became important reasons for World Labs to accept the acquisition less than two years after its founding. Lisa Su was an early investor in the company, and over the past year the two sides have worked together on training and inference optimization around AMD GPUs. Li hopes to use AMD’s computing power and engineering resources to expand the company’s research and advance hardware-software co-design.
AMD, in turn, hopes to use the team to gain early insight into the new computing infrastructure requirements created by inference, robotics, simulation, and physical AI. Lisa Su said that end-to-end understanding models can help improve systems and will influence the design of next-generation GPUs and platforms. AMD also plans to provide open and proprietary models and build an ecosystem that integrates hardware, software, platforms, and models.
After the transaction is completed, co-founders Justin Johnson and Ben Mildenhall will continue to lead research. Drug discovery, creative production, education, and next-generation robots are among the long-term directions Li has identified, while the current focus is to provide computing power for spatial intelligence. The World Labs team will continue to concentrate on model research and development.
The transaction shows that competition in AI chips is expanding toward spatial models and robotics applications. If the acquisition is completed as planned by the end of 2026, World Labs will receive more direct computing support. The large-scale application of spatial intelligence remains to be proven, and the transaction still requires regulatory approval.
