AMD is acquiring World Labs (founded by AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li) for $8.2 billion, adding proprietary AI software capabilities to its semiconductor portfolio.
AMD has announced its acquisition of World Labs, the spatial AI company founded by renowned AI researcher Fei-Fei Li. While Nvidia pursues Hugging Face, AMD is building its own AI software capability through this deal.
Li holds the title "Godmother of AI" for her foundational contributions to the field. She is best known for ImageNet, a dataset of more than 14 million images used to train and validate visual machine learning algorithms.
Li began building ImageNet in 2007, establishing an annual competition to determine which computer vision algorithms could most accurately classify images. The field shifted dramatically in 2012 when Geoff Hinton—one of the three "Godfathers of AI"—and his team at the University of Toronto introduced AlexNet, a GPU-based neural network that dominated the competition. This breakthrough ignited the rapid advancement of deep learning, what Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang termed the "Cambrian Explosion of AI," whose effects continue to reverberate today.
Born in China in 1976, Li immigrated to New Jersey at age 12. She earned a physics degree from Princeton University and a doctorate in electrical engineering from Caltech, then returned to Princeton as an assistant professor from 2007 to 2009—the period during which she founded ImageNet.
In 2013, Li joined Stanford University as co-director of both the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence and the Stanford Vision and Learning Lab. During a sabbatical from 2017 to 2018, she served as Chief Scientist of AI/ML at Google Cloud before returning to Stanford, where she established the RAISE-Health (Responsible AI for Safe and Equitable Health) program in 2023.
Li founded World Labs in 2024 to advance computer vision, deep learning, and robotics. The physical AI startup raised more than $1.2 billion and developed the Marble line of foundation world models for 3D simulation and spatial reasoning.
"We built the company guided by the foundational belief that language alone isn't sufficient for model development," Li wrote in a September 28 Substack post. "The universe isn't made up of words; it's made of real things. So many of the most important problems for AI to solve, from science to entertainment to robotics, require models to reason over the structure and behavior of the physical world."
In 2025, World Labs established a technical partnership with AMD to optimize model training and inference workloads on AMD's GPUs. "As our teams worked together, we realized it would be a natural fit to bring together our AI ecosystem of software and hardware, foundation models, and applications," Li wrote. "Just like I knew it was time to do a startup to jumpstart the work of creating foundation models beyond LLMs and achieve the most impact in AI, it's again very clear that the right path for myself and World Labs is to continue our mission as a part of AMD."
Named an AIwire 2026 Person to Watch, Li will become AMD's Chief Scientist upon acquisition completion, expected by year-end 2026 subject to standard closing conditions. She will report directly to AMD CEO Lisa Su, who also received the same AIwire recognition.
"Fei-Fei and the World Labs team bring exceptional research leadership and model expertise," Su stated. "Together, we can use that insight to develop the hardware, software and systems that will power the next generation of AI and strengthen the open AI ecosystem."
AMD has prospered substantially from the AI boom, which has driven demand for its Instinct GPUs and Epyc CPUs. The company posted a 50% revenue increase in its most recent quarter and is on track to exceed $40 billion in annual revenue. With a market capitalization just under $1 trillion, AMD ranks as the 15th most valuable company globally.