AMD has agreed to acquire World Labs in a transaction valued at $8.2 billion, subject to regulatory approval. The companies expect the deal to close by the end of the year, bringing a prominent world-model research group inside Nvidia’s largest GPU rival.
World models aim to build useful predictive simulations of physical environments, often by learning from large video collections. World Labs’ first public product, Marble, generates small 3D spaces with Gaussian splats that can be exported for film, games and other applications. The company has since introduced additional models, including Atlas.
The technology also has a less visible but strategically important use: generating synthetic environments and data for training robots. Nvidia already offers its Cosmos stack for physical AI, while AMD has released an open-source model called Micro-World but has not assembled an equivalent collection of models and applications.
World Labs was founded in 2024 by Fei-Fei Li, Justin Johnson, Christoph Lassner and Ben Mildenhall after raising $230 million, including investment from AMD. Under the deal, Li will become AMD’s executive vice president and chief scientist. Johnson and Mildenhall will continue leading the World Labs team. The purchase gives AMD research talent and workload knowledge, but approval and integration still remain ahead.