AMD to buy World Labs for $8.2 billion by year-end

World Labs was founded in 2024 by Fei-Fei Li with fellow researchers Justin Johnson, Christoph Lassner, and Ben Mildenhall, and raised $230 million in funding, some of which came from AMD. Its first publicly usable tool, Marble, generates small 3D spaces using Gaussian splats, which can be exported as 3D assets for film production and game development. The company has since introduced additional models and tools with different emphases or use cases, such as Atlas.

One use case that has justified enormous investment in world models is generating synthetic data for training robots. AMD has produced its own AI models before, including Micro-World, an open-source world model, but it has not produced a stack that competes with Nvidia's Cosmos and related models and applications. Nvidia, AMD's direct competitor, has a strong lead in that space.

The deal's value to AMD may hinge on whether World Labs' talent and technology can translate into a competitive stack of world models and applications. Regulatory approval is still required, and the body does not say when that decision might come.