AMD will acquire Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs for $8.2 billion

AMD is acquiring World Labs, one of the leading developers of deep learning models intended to understand physical reality, in a $8.2 billion deal, the two companies said today. World Labs justified the deal in a statement saying that AI development required “close collaboration across model research, systems and compute.” AMD, in turn, says that understanding frontier workloads, like those created at World Labs, will shape its chip-making roadmap.

The acquisition will see World Labs founder Fei-Fei Li join AMD as executive vice president and chief scientist. AMD and World Labs formed an inference optimization-and-training partnership last year, and ties have remained close. Notably, Li was a guest at AMD’s CES presentation earlier this year. Li, a Stanford computer science professor, is considered a pioneer in AI, particularly computer vision, for her work building the ImageNet database and the AI competitions it inspired.

In 2024, Li founded World Labs to develop deep learning models with…