Advanced Micro Devices said on Monday it would acquire Fei-Fei Li’s AI startup, World Labs, in an ⁠all-stock ​deal valued at $8.2 billion, a move that would give the chipmaker a foothold in research on physical AI systems that can understand and simulate the world.

The acquisition gives AMD access to ​research ​on spatial intelligence, an emerging field focused ⁠on enabling AI systems to model three-dimensional environments and physical interactions, which could shape future demand ‌for chips, software and AI infrastructure.

“We began a deep technical partnership with AMD last year, starting with model training and inference optimization on AMD GPUs,” Li said in a post on LinkedIn.

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“As our teams worked together, we realized it would be a natural fit to bring ⁠together our AI ⁠ecosystem of software and hardware, foundation models, and applications.”

World Labs raised $1 billion in a funding ⁠round earlier ‌this year that included an investment from AMD.

The ​technology is aimed at helping AI ‌systems better understand and reason about the physical world, with potential uses in robotics, simulation, design and ‌other real-world applications.

AMD said ​it expects ​World Labs’ ​research to provide deeper insight into emerging AI workloads and help guide its technology roadmaps across ​hardware, software and systems.

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Li, a prominent ⁠AI researcher known for her work in computer vision, will join AMD as executive vice president and chief scientist after the ‌transaction ⁠closes. She will report to CEO Lisa Su. The deal is expected to close by the ​end of 2026.