Just now, the two influential tech leaders Lisa Su and Fei-Fei Li joined forces, and AMD acquired the world model at a price of 55 billion.
Just now, an epic blockbuster M&A deal took place in Silicon Valley.
World Labs, a spatial intelligence startup founded by "Godmother of AI" Li Feifei, has been acquired by AMD for a staggering $8.2 billion!
The powerful partnership between two Silicon Valley queens, Lisa Su and Li Feifei, is absolutely stunning.
For a computing power giant to step into the 3D native ecosystem on its own also marks that AI has officially moved from the linguistic dimension to the physical world.
In her open personal letter *Go Seek a Newer World*, Li Feifei quoted a famous line from British poet Alfred Tennyson's *Ulysses*:
"Come, my friends, 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world."
Historic Partnership: The Chip Queen and the Godmother of AI Join Forces
Today, AMD officially announced that it has reached a definitive agreement to acquire World Labs led by Li Feifei.
After the transaction is completed, Li Feifei will serve as Executive Vice President and Chief Scientist of AMD, reporting directly to Lisa Su, Chairman and CEO of AMD.
This $8.2 billion deal represents the handshake between two Chinese tech queens, whose weight far exceeds that of an ordinary commercial M&A.
On one side is "Chip Queen" Lisa Su. In 2014, she took over AMD, which had suffered consecutive years of losses, staged a comeback in desperate situations, and successfully turned it into Nvidia's most formidable rival.
On the other side is "Godmother of AI" Li Feifei. The Chengdu girl who once worked part-time in New Jersey and helped her family run a dry cleaner later created ImageNet with her own hands, opening the door to the deep learning era.
Their connection dates back a long time.
Right after World Labs was founded, Lisa Su became its early investor and firm supporter. Since last year, the two sides have been training models together on AMD's GPUs.
At the CES in January this year, Lisa Su invited Li Feifei to the keynote speech stage, and announced that Marble had achieved a speed increase of more than 4 times after optimization on AMD's MI325X. Li Feifei stated on the spot that she could not wait to see it continue to improve on the MI450.
Nine months later, Lisa Su simply bought the entire company. Li Feifei serves as Executive Vice President and Chief Scientist of AMD, reporting directly to Lisa Su.
The reason why the two legendary queens choose to bind together at this moment is reflected in one sentence in Li Feifei's long article: "The universe is not made of words, but of real things."
Large language models are getting closer and closer to their ceiling, and tech giants are increasingly convinced that for AI to truly change the world, machines must understand, perceive and transform the real physical world.
This cannot be achieved by one party alone.
Lisa Su needs a top team to tell her what kind of chips next-generation models will need several years in advance. Li Feifei wants AI to generate walkable 3D worlds in real time, which requires an astonishing amount of computing power. She wrote in her long article that without dedicated hardware investment, AI will always be trapped in the digital world.
Letting AI enter the physical world is the ultimate mission of World Labs, and for AMD, this is also a key step to overtake in corners!
"AI is personal, and it is also a cause for civilization"
In the letter, Li Feifei rarely reviewed her 26-year mental journey in the AI industry, and wrote a thought-provoking sentence:
For me, AI is both a personal pursuit and a cause for the progress of human civilization.
In 2000, Li Feifei, who stepped into the academic world as a graduate student, was deeply attracted by this proposition: how to solve the problem of visual intelligence of machines and brains?
At that time, she did not know that the few steps she took out of curiosity would precisely step on every historical node of the subsequent AI development path.
In 2009, AI was in a long "winter period", and the industry was full of pessimism about the future of neural networks.
But Li Feifei and her team did a seemingly "clumsy" thing — they released ImageNet. This huge dataset containing tens of millions of manually labeled images provided massive "nutrients" for AI algorithms.
It was the birth of ImageNet, combined with neural network algorithms and their implementation on GPUs, that jointly detonated the AlexNet miracle in 2012, directly giving birth to the deep learning era.
It can be said that without ImageNet, there would be no prosperity of AI today.
In the following dozen years, Li Feifei's career went smoothly as if she had opened a cheat code:
Top academic research in the fields of computer vision, deep learning, robotics and healthcare;
Crossing into the industry, founding Google Cloud's AI division as its chief scientist;
Returning to academia and becoming the founding director of Stanford HAI...
It can be found that every turn Li Feifei makes has a clear logic — "people-oriented".
Her work has always been guided by a strong desire: not to show off skills, but to solve real-world problems, and work with humans to promote social well-being.
Nowadays, Li Feifei keenly perceives that relying solely on academic research can no longer keep up with the rapid development of the times.
"I know that the path with the most potential for deep and broad positive impact is to found a startup to tackle the most bold technical challenges."
So in early 2024, she teamed up with two world-class AI researchers — Ben Mildenhall and Justin Johnson, to found World Labs.
Her goal is extremely clear: to build a cutting-edge lab focusing on the most important challenges in AI; once these challenges are solved, they will greatly improve AI's ability to cope with real-world problems.
It only took two years, and earlier this month World Labs delivered an industry-shocking answer sheet: the multi-modal world model Atlas.
Its principle is to predict the "next perspective" by inputting several 2D images. It is the first model of its kind trained from scratch, which can directly generate, reconstruct and simulate an interactive 3D environment from text, image and video inputs.
AI has finally grown a pair of "3D eyes" that can truly understand the physical world.
Lisa Su, Bets on the Next Round of AI Competition
The person who is really behind this whole game is Lisa Su.
When she took over as AMD CEO in 2014, the company's market value was less than $3 billion, with annual revenue of $4 billion, and Wall Street thought it was on the verge of collapse.
Twelve years later, AMD's market value once exceeded $1 trillion, and its stock price rose 45 times.
What did she do right? Two crazy bets.
First, she sold off the wafer fabs and outsourced all chip manufacturing to TSMC. At that time, everyone thought AMD was crazy to give up its identity of "manufacturing chips by itself". But it was TSMC's advanced process that later gave AMD the capital to compete head-on with Intel and Nvidia.
Second, she bet on the Chiplet architecture, splitting chips into small pieces and then packaging them. It was extremely risky at that time, but now it has become the industry standard.
In 2025, AMD signed a 6GW GPU supply agreement with OpenAI, directly shaking Nvidia's myth of "dominating the market alone".
The MI355X chip outperforms Nvidia's B200 in multiple tests, delivering 40% more tokens per dollar.
But Lisa Su looks further, she knows that hardware alone is not enough.
The future AI competition is a full-stack war of "chips + models + applications". So when Li Feifei founded World Labs, Lisa Su was one of the first investors.
The two sides have been training models on AMD GPUs since last year. Acquiring World Labs allows AMD to have a world-class world model team, which can know in advance what hardware future AI models will need.
Where the calculation is slow, where the data cannot be moved, and which designs need to be modified, the model team and the chip team can find the answers together.
Of course, $8.2 billion is just the starting point. The transaction is expected to be completed by the end of the year, still subject to regulatory approval; how much efficiency improvement technical synergy can bring also needs to be proved by subsequent results.
But Lisa Su's intention is already clear: AMD wants to sit at the table earlier to see where the next round of AI will go.
"Building the next generation of AI computing platforms requires a deep understanding of how models evolve." Lisa Su pointed out the core in the acquisition statement.
The top team of World Labs joining AMD means that AMD will have the world's top "algorithm brain" to guide future chip design.
This is the real power of the "combination of two sharp swords".
From then on, Li Feifei has unlimited computing power resources and the freedom of underlying hardware to accelerate the realization of spatial intelligence.
And Lisa Su has obtained a sharp sword, allowing AMD's hardware to be directly built on the most advanced next-generation AI models.
References:
https://x.com/drfeifei/status/2104664403681632453https://drfeifei.substack.com/worldlabs-joining-amdhttps://newsroom.amd.com/news/amd-acquire-world-labs/
https://ir.amd.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1299/amd-to-acquire-world-labs-to-advance-the-future-of-ai-compute
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