World Labs is joining AMD as Fei-Fei Li becomes chief scientist

AMD has signed a definitive agreement to bring World Labs into the company, combining its hardware and software stack with the spatial intelligence startup's World Models. Fei-Fei Li will join AMD as executive vice president and chief scientist, while the World Labs team will form a new research organization inside the company.

World Models meet the GPU maker

Model training initially brought the two companies together. That relationship is now set to move much further: World Labs has signed a definitive agreement to join AMD, with the transaction expected to close before the end of the year subject to regulatory approvals.

Founded in 2024 by Fei-Fei Li, Justin Johnson, Ben Mildenhall, and Christoph Lassner, World Labs develops spatial intelligence and World Models designed to perceive, generate, reason about, and interact with virtual and physical environments.

Its first product, Marble, generates persistent 3D environments from text, images, video, and 3D layouts.

The company's research recently expanded with Atlas, a multimodal World Model pretrained natively across text, images, video, and 3D. Its architecture combines these inputs into a shared spatial context before generating what comes next. A hardware relationship was already in place

AMD was already both a financial and technical partner to World Labs. The chipmaker participated in the company's $1 billion funding round alongside investors including NVIDIA, Autodesk, Fidelity, and Emerson Collective.

The teams were also working together on model training and inference optimization across AMD GPUs. World Labs says that technical collaboration eventually led both companies to consider a combined organization spanning hardware, software, foundation models, and applications.

Financial terms of the transaction have not been disclosed in the publicly available information. Fei-Fei Li joins AMD's executive team

The agreement also brings a significant leadership change. Fei-Fei Li will become executive vice president and chief scientist at AMD, working directly with CEO Lisa Su.

Justin Johnson and Ben Mildenhall will continue leading the World Labs team alongside Li. The group is expected to become a new research organization within AMD focused on frontier models and spatial intelligence.

The move comes as AMD is also expanding its work around Physical AI and robotics, positioning its infrastructure across the training, simulation, and deployment of robotic systems from cloud infrastructure to edge hardware. An ecosystem described as open

The two companies say they plan to build an end-to-end AI ecosystem spanning hardware, software, platforms, applications, and widely accessible open models.

That wording does not yet specify which future World Labs models will be released or under what licenses. It is therefore too early to characterize the organization's future output broadly as either open source or open weights.

World Labs had already expanded toward robotics through its acquisition of SceniX, connecting World Models with learning-based simulation and real-world robotic learning.

The AMD transaction is expected to close by the end of 2026, subject to regulatory approval and customary closing conditions.