AMD Acquires Spatial AI Startup World Labs for $8.2B, Hiring Fei-Fei Li
AMD has agreed to acquire San Francisco-based spatial AI startup World Labs in an all-stock deal valued at approximately $8.2 billion. As part of the acquisition, World Labs co-founder Fei-Fei Li will join AMD as Executive Vice President and Chief Scientist, reporting directly to CEO Lisa Su. The acquisition strengthens AMD's capability to design chips and computing systems tailored for next-generation 3D spatial models and physical AI applications. Bringing prominent AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li onto AMD's executive leadership team also significantly boosts the company's technical vision against rivals like Nvidia in the AI ecosystem. World Labs specializes in "world models" that reconstruct interactive 3D environments from 2D inputs, facilitating robotics training and industrial simulations. The startup recently introduced Atlas, an omni AI model capable of predicting dynamic 3D camera perspectives from a few static images.
## BACKGROUND
Spatial intelligence in AI refers to the capacity of systems to perceive, reason about, generate, and interact with 3D physical or virtual spaces rather than operating solely on text or 2D pixels. World Labs was co-founded in 2024 by Fei-Fei Li, a renowned computer scientist famous for creating ImageNet, the massive benchmark dataset that catalyzed modern computer vision.