Fei-Fei Li's World Labs raises $1B from AMD, Nvidia, Autodesk and Fidelity

The round was announced on Feb. 18, 2026, with Emerson Collective, Fidelity and Sea among the backers. Autodesk put in $200 million and will advise the company. World Labs did not disclose a valuation. Reports a month earlier pointed to a $5 billion target. That would be roughly five times the $1 billion mark set when the company emerged from stealth in 2024 with $230 million. The money followed the November launch of Marble, its first commercial product, which builds 3D worlds from image or text prompts. On Sept. 28, AMD agreed to acquire World Labs for about $8.2 billion in stock. That is about 64% above the reported round valuation. Closing is expected by the end of 2026, pending regulatory approval. The merger documents do not say whether Nvidia's stake is cashed out or rolled into AMD stock. For founders, the sequence shows how a chip vendor's investment can turn into an acquisition offer. World Labs and AMD began working together in 2025 on training and running its models on AMD GPUs. Strategic investors with a technical tie to the product may become the most likely buyers, so cap-table choices carry exit implications.