AMD Acquires AI 'Godmother' Fei-Fei Li's Startup for 11 Trillion Won, Escalating Ecosystem Competition

AMD Acquires World Labs for $8.2 Billion

Founded by Stanford Professor Fei-Fei Li

World Models Specialized for Robotics and Gaming

American semiconductor company AMD is set to acquire World Labs, an AI startup founded by Stanford University professor Fei-Fei Li—known as the "godmother of the AI industry"—for approximately 11 trillion won. With AMD following Nvidia in expanding its AI semiconductor ecosystem, competition in the sector is expected to intensify further.

PayPay Lee, CEO of World Labs. Reuters-Yonhap News

Lisa Su, CEO of AMD, said in an interview with Bloomberg TV on the 28th (local time) regarding the acquisition of World Labs, "The more we understand the entire process, the better systems we can build." She added, "We aim to access the world-class talent Professor Li has assembled and combine them with AMD's hardware, software, and system capabilities."

On the same day, AMD announced that it will acquire World Labs in an all-stock transaction valued at $8.2 billion (approximately 11.15 trillion won). This represents a 1.64-fold increase over the company's previous valuation of about $5 billion during its $1 billion fundraising round in February. AMD plans to complete the transaction by the end of the year after securing regulatory approval. Professor Li will also join as Senior Vice President and Chief Scientist.

World Labs, established in 2024 by Professor Li—the creator of "ImageNet," the foundation of modern computer vision technology—develops "world models" that learn from images, videos, and text to understand and reproduce 3D environments. These world models have many applications in robotics and the gaming industry, and have come into the spotlight as robot AI has gained increasing attention recently. According to the Financial Times (FT), this is considered one of the next frontiers of AI, surpassing even large language models (LLM) such as OpenAI's ChatGPT.

AMD expects this acquisition to enable the company to offer a broader range of AI models to customers. CEO Su stated, "We will have both open and proprietary models," adding, "AMD has contributed to this field, and I believe we will expand our contributions even further going forward." She also emphasized, "Our ambition is to define the future of AI computing."

The news of this acquisition comes as Nvidia, a leading player in the industry, is also expanding its ecosystem beyond AI semiconductors into model development and robotics. Nvidia has pioneered the approach of bundling AI semiconductors, equipment, and services to help customers deploy systems rapidly. Its recent agreement to acquire prominent AI startup Hugging Face for around $13 billion is also part of this strategy.

Similarly, AMD has defined its own strategy as "end-to-end AI infrastructure" and "full-stack AI solutions," and has been pursuing these goals. To that end, the company acquired Finnish AI firm Silo AI in 2024 for $665 million, and last year purchased server company ZT Systems for $4.4 billion.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.