Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (NASDAQ: AMD) shares rose 1.34% to $616.02 at 10:27 a.m. ET Tuesday, strengthening from premarket levels in the first regular trading session after the company announced an agreement to acquire World Labs.
AMD closed Monday at $607.87, down 3.61%. The company announced the transaction after Monday’s closing bell.
AMD agreed to acquire World Labs, a spatial-intelligence and simulation technology company led by AI researcher Dr. Fei-Fei Li, in an all-stock transaction valued at approximately $8.2 billion.
Rosenblatt and Stifel both reiterated Buy ratings Tuesday, focusing on how World Labs could broaden AMD’s AI capabilities, particularly in spatial intelligence and robotics.
Rosenblatt, Stifel See Broader AI Capabilities
Rosenblatt maintained its $700 price target and said the acquisition expands AMD’s capabilities across AI software, modeling and simulation. The firm said increasingly complex AI markets require system-level expertise beyond traditional semiconductor design and that World Labs engineers could accelerate AMD’s development of system-level AI platforms while opening opportunities in areas including robotics.
Rosenblatt also said the transaction effectively brings forward research and development spending AMD might otherwise have incurred to develop similar technology capabilities in-house.
Stifel maintained its Buy rating and $635 price target, pointing to World Labs as a way for AMD to broaden its AI model capabilities. The firm noted that AMD has released text- and video-based open models, while World Labs adds spatial-intelligence technology that can model and simulate physical environments.
Stifel also highlighted potential applications in robotics, where limited real-world training data can constrain development. World Labs’ Atlas technology can reconstruct real environments from a small number of phone images and generate the sensor observations a simulated robot would encounter, according to the firm.
However, Stifel noted that World Labs remains early in its commercial development and that AMD has not disclosed the expected financial or profit-and-loss impact of the transaction.
World Labs Brings Spatial-Intelligence Research to AMD
The deal is expected to close by the end of 2026, subject to regulatory approvals and customary closing conditions.
World Labs develops spatial-intelligence models that generate, reconstruct and simulate interactive 3D environments from text, image and video inputs, along with technology for robotic learning and simulation. AMD said the research will give it deeper insight into evolving AI workloads as it develops future hardware, software and systems.
After the transaction closes, Li is set to join AMD as executive vice president and chief scientist, reporting to CEO Lisa Su. World Labs and AMD had already worked together on model training and inference optimization using AMD GPUs before the agreement.
Meanwhile, Advanced Micro Devices Tokenized bStocks (AMDB) was down 0.27% over the prior 24 hours at $611.43, according to CoinMarketCap.