AMD buys Fei-Fei Li's company World Labs for $8.2 billion in stock

The foundry paid in full in shares and brought in Fei-Fei Li as executive vice president and chief scientific officer. This was its second most expensive acquisition, far behind Xilinx.

AMD has announced the acquisition of World Labs, a start-up specializing in so-called space intelligence models, for $8.2 billion paid entirely in shares. The transaction is expected to close before the end of the year, subject to regulatory approvals. Its founder, Fei-Fei Li, will join the foundry as executive vice president and chief scientific officer.

World Labs designs models that can generate, reconstruct and simulate interactive three-dimensional environments from text, images or video, as well as building blocks for robotic learning and simulation. The two companies already knew each other: a partnership on inference optimization and training was established last year.

At $8.2 billion, the transaction becomes the second largest in AMD's history, far behind the acquisition of Xilinx concluded for around $50 billion in 2022. Above all, it signals the foundry's intention to no longer sell only silicon, but also to own part of the software layer that runs on it.