In a significant move that underscores Saudi Arabia’s growing ambitions in the global artificial intelligence arena, PIF-backed AI company Humain has led a USD 900 million Series C funding round for the US-based generative AI firm, Luma AI. The landmark investment positions the Kingdom as a pivotal player in the development of next-generation AI.
The round, which also saw participation from prominent investors including AMD Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Amplify Partners, and Matrix Partners, was announced at the U.S.-Saudi Investment Forum in Washington. The deal signifies a deep strategic partnership aimed at advancing the frontier of multimodal intelligence on a global scale.
A Strategic Push Into Multimodal Intelligence
Founded in 2021, Luma AI specializes in building multimodal AI systems capable of generating, understanding, and operating within the physical world, moving beyond the limitations of traditional Large Language Models (LLMs). This new capital injection will accelerate the company’s efforts to train large-scale “World Models.”
These foundational AI models learn from humanity’s vast digital footprint across video, audio, and language to understand and simulate reality. This technology has far-reaching applications, empowering products in robotics, entertainment, advertising, gaming, and personalized education.
Leveraging Saudi’s Supercomputing Power
A core component of the partnership is Luma AI’s commitment to becoming a key customer of Humain’s “Project Halo.” This initiative is developing a 2-gigawatt AI supercluster in Saudi Arabia, set to be one of the world’s largest compute infrastructure buildouts. This immense computational power will be crucial for training and deploying the complex World Models Luma AI is developing.
“Our investment in Luma AI, combined with HUMAIN’s 2GW supercluster, positions us to train, deploy, and scale multimodal intelligence at a frontier level,” said Tareq Amin, CEO of Humain. “This partnership sets a new benchmark for how capital, compute, and capability come together.”
Building Culturally Nuanced World Models
The joint effort aims to create AI systems that are not only powerful but also culturally aware. The models will be designed to understand cultural context, visual nuance, and linguistic diversity. This approach seeks to empower creators, enterprises, and governments to adopt AI that reflects their unique identities, values, and sovereignty, ensuring a more inclusive and representative technological future.
About Humain
Humain is a PIF-backed artificial intelligence company based in Saudi Arabia. It is focused on building large-scale AI infrastructure, including its 2-gigawatt “Project Halo” supercluster, to train and deploy frontier AI models. The company aims to position the Kingdom as a global leader in AI development and application.
About Luma AI
Founded in 2021 by Alberto Taiuti and Amit Jain, Luma AI is a US-based generative AI company. It builds multimodal intelligence that goes beyond text-based models to generate, understand, and interact with the physical world through video, audio, and language, creating what it calls “World Models.”
Source: Waya
