advanced micro device announced Monday that it has agreed to acquire World Labs, a San Francisco-based AI research institute founded by industry pioneer Fei-Fei Li, for $8.2 billion.
The chipmaker, which previously invested in World Labs, said it was paying for the startup with stock.
Lee is a professor at Stanford University and previously google Led AI research. She will become AMD’s Chief Scientist and AMD’s Executive Vice President. Nvidia In the market for AI processors.
World Labs develops so-called world models that can be used to simulate 3D environments. In a demo unveiled by Li and AMD CEO Lisa Su earlier this year, the two executives showed off a World Labs model called Marble that creates a 3D scene from a few images.
“Intelligent agents, whether they’re robots, vehicles, or tools, can learn within a very rich, physics-aware digital world before being deployed into the real world, making them safer,” Lee said in the presentation.
In a social media post on Monday, Ms. Lee called Ms. Su a “great friend.”
“We remain steadfast in our mission and are even more excited to continue building a sustainable, world-leading frontier research organization for decades to come,” Lee wrote.
AI researchers hope the world model will help develop robots and other physically grounded AI applications. AMD plans to keep World Labs separate from its chip manufacturing operations until the deal closes later this year.
The lab’s research on next-generation models will allow AMD to plan the features it wants for its AI chips years in advance.
The deal would be the chipmaker’s second-largest acquisition ever, after the roughly $50 billion it paid for Xilinx in 2022.
AMD is creating the biggest buzz yet in the AI M&A market as the U.S. tech giant opens up capital to top engineering and research talent, even for relatively early companies.
OpenAI Last year, it acquired Jony Ive’s AI device startup io for about $6.4 billion, bringing the famous iPhone designer on board. Nvidia It agreed to spend a combined $33 billion on AI chip maker Groq and open source platform Hugging Face, buying assets from the former in December and acquiring the latter this month. and meta The company inked a deal to invest $14 billion in 2025 for a minority stake in Scale AI and bring in the startup’s founder, Alexandr Wang, to create a new AI division.
Remember: AI is not a new asset class, it’s an entire market
