Chipmakers are buying their way up the AI stack.
In 2026, NVIDIA and AMD moved beyond chips with a string of AI-startup deals spanning enterprise data, predictive models, open model platforms, and physical AI. The largest disclosed deal on the timeline is NVIDIA’s agreement to acquire Hugging Face for about $12.9B, according to an NVIDIA SEC filing. AMD followed later in September with an $8.2B all-stock deal for World Labs, the spatial-intelligence startup led by Fei-Fei Li.
The AMD deal is the clearest sign that the chip wars are no longer only about GPUs, interconnects, or rack-scale systems. World Labs develops models for generating, reconstructing, and simulating interactive 3D environments from text, image, and video inputs. After the deal closes, Fei-Fei Li is expected to join AMD as executive vice president and chief scientist, reporting to Lisa Su.
NVIDIA had already been moving in the same direction. Its Hugging Face deal gives it a path deeper into open models, datasets, and AI applications. Earlier in 2026, NVIDIA also acquired Illumex and Kumo AI, smaller deals tied to enterprise semantic data and predictive AI.