AMD announced the acquisition of World Labs, an AI startup founded by Fei-Fei Li, by the end of the year, pending regulatory approval. The deal is valued at $8.2 billion, marking a significant move for AMD in its AI strategy.
World Labs, which was founded in 2024 with $230 million in funding, including support from AMD, has developed world models that simulate the physical world for various applications.
World Labs' first publicly usable tool, Marble, can generate small 3D spaces using Gaussian splats and export them as 3D assets for use in film production and game development.
The company has since introduced additional models and tools with different emphasis or use cases, such as Atlas.
One area that has driven significant investment is generating synthetic data for training robots, a field where Nvidia, AMD’s direct competitor, has a strong lead.
AMD has previously developed its own AI models, including Micro-World, an open-source world model, but has not produced a stack that competes with Nvidia’s Cosmos and related models. This acquisition brings World Labs’ models and leading research talent under AMD’s roof, with Fei-Fei Li becoming Executive Vice President and Chief Scientist at AMD.
"As AI expands into reasoning, robotics, simulation and physical AI, the demands on compute infrastructure become more diverse," said AMD in its announcement. "World Labs’ expertise in developing advanced models will give AMD deeper insight into how workloads are evolving and help shape its future technology roadmaps."
The acquisition comes sooner than expected for a young company, but AMD’s involvement should not be a surprise. The two companies had partnered before, and AMD needs this kind of expertise to compete in an AI chip landscape that Nvidia dominates.
AMD did not specify the exact role of Justin Johnson and Ben Mildenhall, and the integration process remains unclear. The deal is expected to enhance AMD’s capabilities in AI-driven robotics and simulation.
Source: arstechnica
