World Labs Signs Agreement to Join AMD

Summary

World Labs has signed a definitive agreement to join AMD, combining its AI research and technical work with AMD’s hardware and software ecosystem. Founded in 2024, World Labs says its work has focused on AI’s potential to address problems in the spatial and physical world. The companies began a technical partnership last year involving model training and inference optimization on AMD GPUs. World Labs says that collaboration led them to conclude that combining software, foundation models, applications, and hardware would accelerate their shared goals. Fei-Fei Li will become AMD’s executive vice president and chief scientist, reporting directly to CEO Lisa Su. Justin Johnson and Ben Mildenhall will continue leading the World Labs team with Li as it becomes part of AMD and forms what the companies describe as a frontier research organization. The teams also say they intend to build an end-to-end open AI ecosystem spanning hardware, software, platforms, and broadly accessible open models. The transaction is expected to close by the end of 2026, subject to regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions.