AMD to buy Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs for about $8.2 billion

AMD said Monday it will acquire World Labs, the San Francisco AI lab founded by Fei-Fei Li, in an all-stock deal valued at about $8.2 billion, with Li joining as executive vice president and chief scientist reporting to CEO Lisa Su. The companies expect the deal to close by the end of 2026 if regulators approve.

AMD is paying about $8.2 billion in its own stock to put Fei-Fei Li next to Lisa Su, so a lab that builds 3D world models can pull the chip roadmap. The share count is still open. It depends on AMD’s average trading price in the days before close.

On Monday, 28 September 2026, AMD announced a definitive agreement to acquire World Labs, an AI model and research lab led by Dr. Fei-Fei Li. The announcement is AMD’s investor-relations release. World Labs posted its own note the same day. AMD says the lab is based in San Francisco. World Labs says it was founded in 2024. AMD’s release calls Li co-founder and chief executive of World Labs.

AMD said the deal is all stock and valued at about $8.2 billion. All stock means the owners of World Labs are paid in AMD shares, not in cash. AMD said it expects to close by the end of 2026, if regulators approve and the other ordinary closing conditions are met. A closing condition is a requirement the contract still has to clear. World Labs states the same timing. The agreement is in place. The deal has not closed.

The share terms are in AMD’s Form 8-K, a current report filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The form says AMD entered the merger agreement on 26 September 2026, two days before Monday’s announcement. AMD is buying every equity interest in World Labs Technologies, Inc. Equity means ownership of the company. The price is about $8.2 billion, paid in AMD common stock to World Labs stockholders, with the usual adjustments a merger contract allows. The form says the number of shares is not known yet.

That share count will be set from the daily volume-weighted average price of AMD stock on the Nasdaq Global Select Market. The window is ten trading days in a row, ending on the second trading day before the closing date. A volume-weighted average price is the average price in that window, with bigger trades counting more than small ones. If that average is higher, AMD issues fewer shares for the same roughly $8.2 billion. If it is lower, AMD issues more. The report is signed 28 September 2026 by Ava Hahn, AMD’s senior vice president, general counsel, and corporate secretary.

The same filing says AMD intends to issue those shares under exemptions from registration: Section 4(a)(2) of the Securities Act of 1933, and possibly Rule 506 of Regulation D. Those are legal doors for a private sale. In plain terms, the shares go to World Labs’s stockholders. This is not a public offering of new AMD stock to the market, and AMD says it will not advertise that issuance.

After the close, AMD said, Dr. Fei-Fei Li will join AMD as executive vice president and chief scientist, reporting to chair and chief executive Dr. Lisa Su. The World Labs team will keep working on AI model research. World Labs said Justin Johnson and Ben Mildenhall will continue leading that team with Li as it joins AMD. AMD’s release does not give Johnson or Mildenhall a separate title.

What the lab builds, as AMD describes it: spatial-intelligence models that generate, reconstruct, and simulate interactive 3D environments from text, images, and video, plus technology for robotic learning and simulation. Spatial intelligence, in that description, means software that can build a three-dimensional place you can interact with, not only write text or draw a flat picture. Generate means create the place. Reconstruct means rebuild it from a picture or a clip. Simulate means run it so something can happen inside it.

World Labs said the companies began a deep technical partnership last year, starting with model training and inference on AMD GPUs. Training is teaching the model. Inference is running it so it produces a result. A GPU is the chip that does that math. World Labs said the joint work made a fuller combination the natural next step: software, hardware, foundation models, and applications. A foundation model is a large model other products are built on.

Dr. Lisa Su said: “Building the compute platforms for the next generation of AI requires a deep understanding of how models are evolving.” She said Li and the World Labs team bring research leadership AMD can use to develop the hardware, software, and systems for that next generation, and to strengthen what AMD calls an open AI ecosystem. World Labs describes that aim as hardware, software, platforms, and widely accessible open models. Dr. Fei-Fei Li said: “Joining AMD will give our team the resources and engineering depth to accelerate our research and help define the infrastructure needed for the next era of AI.” Those sentences are theirs, in AMD’s release.

TechCrunch’s same-day story adds two points the company releases do not. It describes Li, a Stanford computer science professor, as a pioneer of computer vision for building ImageNet, the picture collection and the contests around it that trained a generation of image-reading systems. Computer vision is software that interprets pictures. TechCrunch also writes that Nvidia already offers open-weight world models, including one named Cosmos, while AMD has so far offered text and video models to the public. Open-weight means the model’s learned numbers are published so others can run them. Those lines are TechCrunch’s.

In plain terms, AMD has agreed to buy a lab that builds 3D world models, and to seat its founder next to Lisa Su. The price is about $8.2 billion in AMD stock. How many shares that takes is still a calculation for the days just before close.

The picture is World Labs’s announcement graphic for this post. The headline reads “World Labs is Joining AMD,” with a globe set on a chip. It is the company’s graphic.