AMD’s Lisa Su, Fei-Fei Li Discuss $8.2 Billion World Labs Deal

SPEAKER_1 (0:02)

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SPEAKER_2 (0:07)

Yeah, I'm looking at what's happening with shares in the after hours of AMD right now. Shares bouncing around just a little bit at first.

As soon as some news crossed that we're going to get to in just a minute, shares shot higher, but now they're flat on the day today. AMD is set to buy World Labs.

SPEAKER_3 (0:25)

All right, so let's get to it. Bloomberg Tech co-host, Ed Ludlow, catching up with the key players in this deal. We're talking about Lisa Su, Chair, President and CEO of AMD, who joined Ed earlier along with Fei-Fei Li, the co-founder and CEO of World Labs. The first voice you hear will be AMD's Lisa Su.

Lisa Su (0:42)

Today is a super exciting day. I can tell you that we are super excited to be acquiring World Labs. I have known Fei-Fei for a long time. I've had tremendous respect for her as a researcher and as a visionary. And if you think about where AI is today, I've said often, Ed, that we're still in the very early innings of AI, and I truly believe that. And what's becoming more and more clear is that the interaction between the hardware, the software, and the systems, and the model layer are such that the more you understand end-to-end, the better system you're going to build. And so that's why we're acquiring World Labs really, is to have access to the world class talent that Fei-Fei has brought together, and really bring it together with AMD's complete capabilities around hardware, software, and systems, and build the future of AI.

Ed Ludlow (1:36)

I think we should get to the backstory with both of you, but would you talk a little bit, Lisa, how it came about, the catalyst for doing the actual transaction?

Lisa Su (1:46)

Well, as I said, I've had tremendous respect for Fei-Fei. Everyone knows just how much she has contributed to AI over the last couple of decades. And from our personal relationship, we've always had that both mutual respect and trust. But what we saw is, AMD was an early investor in World Labs.

We saw Fei-Fei build when there were only just a very few researchers and really building to the team with Marble and then with now the release of Atlas. And what we see is just a tremendous nucleus of capability that would be a huge addition to already our very talented AMD workforce. So I was thrilled that Fei-Fei and her founders were excited about joining AMD.

Ed Ludlow (2:33)

Fei-Fei, reflect on that. I mean, you and I have spoken very recently. This, of course, did not come up. But I suppose a good starting point other than how this came together is, what opportunity did you see for your work and the team at World Labs work to be a part of AMD?

Fei-Fei Li (2:51)

Yes. So just to echo Lisa, this relationship has been going for many, many years. It started with mutual respect and really a genuine friendship at the personal and professional level. We're very grateful when AMD was an early believer and supporter of World Labs, but really what's most fundamental and important and exciting about this merger is the shared vision for the future of AI.

World Labs has been a frontier model building company. We have been running as fast as we can to build the next generation multimodal, omnimodal for spatial and physical intelligence. And as our company grows, so is our ambition, so is our need for compute. And at this point, if we can join force with AMD, we really are giving ourselves and AMD and the ecosystem an opportunity to accelerate this flywheel between software and hardware development, which is critical, critical for today's AI development.

Ed Ludlow (4:01)

Lisa, I think we, let's get into how that would work in practice. This is an $8.2 billion all stock transaction, but I kind of see two distinct things that AMD is acquiring. There is the insight into the development of models and what the future of AI looks like. That helps you inform future generations of hardware, separate from just getting a great team of researchers who can also then offer models. Let's start with the hardware piece. What was your thinking there?

Lisa Su (4:29)

Yeah, well, I think if you take a step back and just look at what we're trying to achieve across this AI ecosystem, I mean, it's a tremendous opportunity.

A lot of the focus today has been on large language models, really the large foundational model labs. We have a very deep and special relationship with folks like OpenAI and Anthropic and Meta.