AMD to Buy Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs for $8.2 Billion

Advanced Micro Devices said Monday it has agreed to buy World Labs, the two-year-old maker of models that can simulate three-dimensional spaces, for about $8.2 billion in an all-stock transaction.

The deal is expected to close at the end of this year, AMD said. World Labs CEO and AI researcher Fei-Fei Li will join AMD as executive vice president and chief scientist and will report to president and CEO Lisa Su.

World Labs raised more than $1 billion from investors including AMD, Nvidia, Andreessen Horowitz and Radical Ventures, most recently at a $5.4 valuation after the investment, according to PitchBook.

It’s one of several startups led by high-profile researchers that raised large sums of money in a relatively quick period to take on the costly process of training models. AMD and rival Nvidia have raced to back these startups, which hold the potential to become large customers. Nvidia also recently bought Hugging Face, a repository of open-source models, for $13 billion.