AMD to acquire another AI software firm, World Labs
The planned acquisition is expected to close by the end of 2026
AMD has announced its second intended acquisition of 2026, signing a definitive agreement with World Labs valued at $8.2 billion.
World Labs is an AI software firm founded just two years ago by Stanford University professor and AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li. It specializes in “spatial intelligence” AI technology, which allows AI models to understand the three-dimensional world.
Its relationship with AMD started in 2025, with model training and inference optimization on the company’s GPUs. AMD also invested in World Labs in February 2026, and Li spoke during the AMD keynote at CES 2026.
World Labs’ first product, Marble, was launched in November 2025. In a blog post announcing the launch, the company explained: “Our human experience of the world is inherently multimodal: we use all of our senses to make sense of the world around us.
“World models should… be massively multimodal, able to lift whatever input signals are available into a full 3D world, and they should be able to iteratively update their understanding of the world as new information becomes available.”
While Marble doesn’t entirely fulfil this brief, it “[makes] strides towards this vision”.
More recently, on 1 September 2026, it released Atlas, an “omni model that [World Labs] pretrained from scratch to natively operate on text, images, video, and 3D”.
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AMD’s “physical AI” ambitions
The acquisition of World Labs underlines the role physical AI plays in AMD’s plans for the future.
In the official AMD announcement of the proposed deal, AMD said: “As AI expands into reasoning, robotics, simulation, and physical AI, the demands on compute infrastructure become more diverse. World Labs’ expertise in developing advanced models will give AMD deeper insight into how workloads are evolving and help shape its future technology roadmaps.”
In a blog post explaining the decision to join AMD, Li said the company needed to move “closer to the hardware” in order to solve the problems it has been working on using software alone.
“Without having a focused hardware effort, AI is hobbled in efficiency. And scale. And for our purposes, remains trapped in the digital world,” Li said.
“We've seen up close how Lisa [Su, AMD CEO] is boldly leading AMD as a major player in the hardware ecosystem with incredible momentum,” Li continued. “As our teams worked together, we realized what a natural fit it would be to bring together our AI ecosystem of software and hardware, foundation models and applications.”
The all-stock acquisition is expected to close before the end of 2026, subject to regulatory approval.
Jane McCallion is Managing Editor of ITPro and ChannelPro, specializing in data centers, enterprise IT infrastructure, and cybersecurity. Before becoming Managing Editor, she held the role of Deputy Editor and, prior to that, Features Editor, managing a pool of freelance and internal writers, while continuing to specialize in enterprise IT infrastructure, and business strategy.
Prior to joining ITPro, Jane was a freelance business journalist writing as both Jane McCallion and Jane Bordenave for titles such as European CEO, World Finance, and Business Excellence Magazine.
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