AMD to buy Fei-Fei Li’s AI start-up for $8bn

{"text":[[{"start":8.56,"text":"AMD has agreed to acquire AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li’s start-up World Labs for $8.2bn in an all-stock transaction that will push the Nvidia competitor further beyond chips into cutting-edge model development."}],[{"start":22.12,"text":"Li, the Stanford University researcher described as the “godmother of artificial intelligence”, founded the company in 2024 to work on so-called world models, AI systems that can understand and replicate 3D environments."}],[{"start":36.28,"text":"AMD’s chief executive Lisa Su said the deal would help the near-$1tn chip designer “shape its future technology road maps” by giving it insight into how the uses for AI are evolving."}],[{"start":47.78,"text":"Both AMD and its chief rival Nvidia are expanding beyond semiconductors into AI model development, using their huge earnings from hardware sales in recent years."}],[{"start":57.52,"text":"Nvidia, which builds its own models, earlier this month announced a $13bn deal to buy AI platform Hugging Face. It has committed hundreds of billions of dollars to start-up investments, debt guarantees and financial backstops across the AI sector."}],[{"start":73.24,"text":"AMD’s deal for San Francisco-based World Labs, which it expects to close by the end of 2026 pending regulatory approval, gives it a foothold in world models, which have potential applications in industries such as robotics and gaming."}],[{"start":87.2,"text":"World models, trained on images, video and text, are widely considered one of the next frontiers in AI beyond the large language models behind tools such as ChatGPT. Former Meta AI chief Yann LeCun left the company late last year to launch his own start-up focused on world models."}],[{"start":null,"text":"

"}],[{"start":104.76,"text":"“Advancing the next generation of AI technology requires close collaboration across model research, systems and compute,” said Li. “Joining AMD will give our team the resources and engineering depth to accelerate our research and help define the infrastructure needed for the next era of AI.”"}],[{"start":122.12,"text":"Li, who is best known for founding ImageNet, a database that became the foundation of modern computer vision technology, will join AMD as executive vice-president and chief scientist."}],[{"start":132.44,"text":"Li said in a blog post that “without a focused hardware, AI is hobbled in efficiency”. The two companies partnered last year to train models on AMD’s chips and discovered they were a “natural fit”, she wrote."}],[{"start":144.6,"text":"AMD invested in World Labs as part of a $1bn fundraising in February that included Nvidia, at a reported $5bn valuation. Andreessen Horowitz is among the start-up’s early backers."}],[{"start":157.44,"text":"AMD has made acquisitions over recent years as it looks to build its hardware and software ecosystem. These include its $4.4bn acquisition of ZT Systems in 2025 and the $665mn acquisition of Finnish AI model company Silo AI in 2024."}],[{"start":175.48,"text":"It has also agreed deals to supply chips to leading AI model makers, offering up its equity to secure long-term purchase commitments. In February, AMD struck a multibillion-dollar chip supply deal with Meta, with a provision for the social media group to take up to a 10 per cent stake in the company over time. An October 2025 deal with OpenAI included a similar share arrangement."}],[{"start":197.88,"text":"AMD announced it would invest up to $5bn in OpenAI’s main rival Anthropic as it commits to buying tens of billions of dollars of AMD’s AI data centre chips."}],[{"start":208.56,"text":"The World Labs deal comes as AMD and its rivals expect a new phase of massive growth from AI in robotics, with the companies developing specialised chips for these purposes."}],[{"start":218.56,"text":"The companies are also experimenting with new chip architectures that could start to displace the graphics processing units that dominated the first phase of AI computing."}],[{"start":227.96,"text":"Nvidia paid $20bn in December 2025 to hire top executives and licence technology from start-up Groq, which developed a specialised accelerator chip aimed at running AI models faster than current hardware. Nvidia incorporated this technology into a new product this year. In August, AMD announced it was acquiring specialised chip company Taalas."}],[{"start":252.26,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1790643756_7657.mp3"}