AMD will acquire World Labs, an AI model and research lab led by Fei-Fei Li, for $8.2 billion, the company said in a statement on Monday.

The transaction is expected to close by the end of 2026, subject to regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions.

World Labs, based in San Francisco, builds “spatial intelligence” models that generate, reconstruct, and simulate interactive 3D environments from text, image, and video inputs. It also features technology for robotic learning and simulation.

The acquisition can bring a team of AI researchers and model experts in-house, strengthening its ability to develop hardware, software, and systems around emerging models and applications, AMD said.

As AI extends into reasoning, robotics, simulation and physical AI, World Labs can provide deeper insight into evolving workloads and help shape its future technology roadmaps, AMD highlighted.

After the deal closes, the World Labs team will continue its AI model research and Li will join AMD as executive vice president and chief scientist, reporting to chair and chief executive Lisa Su.

Li said joining AMD would give her team the resources and engineering depth to accelerate its research and help define the infrastructure for the next era of AI.

Su said building compute platforms for the next generation of AI required a deep understanding of the direction models are taking, and that the World Labs team’s research and model expertise would help AMD develop the hardware, software and systems to support it.

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