SAN FRANCISCO — September 28, 2026 — World Labs today announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to join AMD. The combination is intended to scale research on spatial and physical intelligence, bring model development closer to compute, and help build an end-to-end open AI ecosystem spanning hardware, software, platforms, and widely accessible models.

The all-stock transaction is valued at approximately $8.2 billion and is expected to close by the end of 2026, subject to regulatory approvals and customary closing conditions.

World Labs, founded in 2024 by Dr. Fei-Fei Li with co-founders Justin Johnson and Ben Mildenhall, builds frontier models that perceive, generate, reconstruct, reason about, and interact with three-dimensional environments. Its work includes spatial-intelligence models for creative tools and design, large-scale training for images, video, and reconstruction, and robotics simulation following the SceniX combination. The company recently introduced Atlas, an omni-model architecture trained to predict new camera views from 2D images—addressing sparse reconstruction by combining generative models with multi-view geometry.

In a public note shared on Substack, X.com and LinkedIn, Li described the move as the next chapter of a career spent pushing AI from academic curiosity toward technology that solves real-world problems. “The universe isn’t made up of words; it’s made of real things,” she wrote. Language-only models, she argued, are not enough for science, entertainment, robotics, or other domains that require reasoning over the structure and behavior of the physical world.

World Labs said research progress since 2024 has clarified AI’s potential in spatial and physical settings. Scaling that work, the company said, requires broader reach and closer coupling to hardware. Without a focused hardware effort, efficiency and scale suffer, and models remain trapped in the digital world.

The companies have worked together since World Labs’ early days. AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su was an early investor and believer in the mission. Last year the teams began a deep technical partnership on model training and inference optimization on AMD 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.

After closing, Li will join AMD as Executive Vice President and Chief Scientist, working directly with Su. Johnson and Mildenhall will continue leading the World Labs team with Li as it becomes a frontier research organization inside AMD. The team will keep advancing model research while contributing insight into emerging workloads that can inform AMD’s hardware, software, and systems roadmaps.

Li framed the decision in the same terms she used when leaving a purely academic path to found World Labs: the highest-impact route is to take foundation models beyond large language models and put them in service of physical-world problems. “Just like I knew it was time to do a startup… it’s again very clear that the right path for myself and World Labs is to continue our mission as a part of AMD.”

The companies said they are committed to pushing the frontier openly with the broader community—providing models and platforms that run AI end to end, from hardware and software to models and the data systems that feed them. Li pointed to applications including drug discovery, creativity, learning, and the next generation of robotics.

“Advancing the next generation of AI technology requires close collaboration across model research, systems and compute,” Li said in the companies’ joint statement. “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.”

World Labs said the North Star remains unchanged: build technology in service of humanity. Li wrote that she feels humility, gratitude, and hope at the chance to grow a durable frontier research organization inside a leading AI company—and to seek, with AMD, a newer world.