A woman founder selling to a woman CEO in a multi-billion-dollar deal is rare enough, given women capture just a tiny sliver of venture funding and an even smaller share of billion-dollar deals worldwide.
But when the deal is one of the biggest AI transactions of the year and brings together two of the most influential women in AI, that’s something else altogether.
AI pioneer Dr Fei-Fei Li secured the landmark multi-billion-dollar deal, selling the start-up she co-founded, World Labs, to AMD for a massive US$8.2 billion in stock.
The deal will see Li joining AMD as an executive vice president and chief scientist. There, she’ll report directly to CEO Dr Lisa Su, as the company works to strengthen its position against key competitors, including Nvidia.
This is a story of women backing women with significant money. Li described Su as a friend and an early investor in World Labs in her post announcing the deal on Monday.
And it’s a story of two incredibly smart and accomplished women coming together, to strengthen their position in challenging the existing dominant AI players.
Nvidia dominates the chip market globally, and is now one of the most highly valued companies in the world, turning its co-founder, Jensen Huang, into something of a CEO-as-geopolitical actor, making an appearance with Donald Trump at the White House and recently travelling with Trump to China.
As CEO at AMD, Dr Su has a much lower profile than Huang and offers something so important in the current market: a challenger brand that can help fight against AI concentration. This World Labs deal gives it a chance to push harder against Nvidia, betting on catching up and ultimately strengthening the entire ecosystem.
She has run AMD since 2014, taking it from near collapse to a company worth hundreds of billions. She remains one of the few women running a semiconductor giant.
Dr Fei-Fei Li is a renowned Stanford University researcher and computer scientist. She’s known for building the ImageNet database and the academic competitions that it spawned, and she’s known as the “godmother of AI”.
Her startup, World Labs, builds specialised “world models” used to construct 3D environments for applications in robotics, factories, and scientific simulation.
She has also spent years advocating for human-centred AI, founding Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered AI, which ran the Stanford AI Lab. The fact that this deal puts her at the centre of a major chipmaker and helps to decide what AI chips need to be capable of years in advance is a move that puts another woman at the centre of the hardware aspect of the AI agenda, with the current state of AI development very much being an agenda run by men – with safety issues that we have covered extensively on Women’s Agenda.
Dr Su told Bloomberg TV that a key part of acquiring World Labs is gaining access to the world-class talent Fei-Fei has brought together and combining it with AMD’s capabilities in hardware, software, and systems.
Dr Li said that by joining forces with AMD, they are giving themselves and the ecosystem the opportunity to “accelerate the flywheel between software and hardware development.”
It’s rare to report on women leading major AI announcements, as well as women being involved in multi-billion-dollar deals – the fact that this story has both aspects is exciting and a reason for optimism today, especially given how much the risks of AI development have dominated the headlines in recent weeks.