AMD’s World Labs Deal Puts Fei-Fei Li at the Center of Its Physical AI Push

AMD said it agreed to acquire World Labs, a San Francisco startup cofounded in 2024 by Stanford professor Fei-Fei Li. The all-stock deal is valued at roughly $8.2 billion, placing one of AI’s most influential researchers at the center of AMD’s push into physical AI.

As part of the agreement, Li will join AMD as executive vice president and chief scientist, reporting to CEO Lisa Su.

World Labs is building “world models,” AI systems that can generate and reconstruct interactive 3D environments from text, images, and video. The technology could eventually be used to train robots, simulate factories, and support scientific research.

For readers tracking AI infrastructure, the key takeaway is that AMD is not just chasing chips for today’s models; it is trying to understand and power the systems that could shape the next wave of physical AI.

Li is often called the “godmother of AI” and is best known for creating ImageNet, a large database of labeled images that helped show how more data could dramatically improve computer vision. She later served as chief scientist for AI and machine learning at Google Cloud and became the founding co-director of Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence.

Her move to AMD gives the chipmaker a high-profile scientific leader as it competes in the AI chip market.

Earlier this month, World Labs released Atlas, an AI model designed to predict how a scene would look from a different camera angle using a small set of 2D images. The company compares that approach to how large language models predict the next word in a sentence.

AMD says the acquisition should give it deeper insight into how cutting-edge AI models are evolving and help it build the chips and computing systems needed to power them. The move also underscores AMD’s positioning as one of Nvidia’s biggest rivals in AI chips.