Saudi Arabia’s Humain Backs Luma AI with $900M Series C Boost

Saudi Arabia’s Humain has taken the lead in a hefty USD 900 million Series C round for Luma AI, a US company building multimodal generative AI. The round drew in a strong mix of names – AMD Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Amplify Partners and Matrix Partners among them – and was announced in Washington during the U.S.-Saudi Investment Forum held alongside Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s visit.

What caught my eye, though, was the ambition behind the partnership. The two companies laid out a plan to push the boundaries of multimodal intelligence, which basically means training AI that understands not just words, but video, audio and all the messy, textured digital footprints humans leave behind. A bit of a faff to explain, but spot on in terms of where the industry is heading.

Luma AI, founded in 2021 by Alberto Taiuti and Amit Jain, has been working on what it calls World Models – AI systems designed to simulate and understand reality well enough to power everything from robotics to personalised education. With this fresh capital, the team aims to accelerate training these large-scale models and expand more firmly into entertainment, advertising, simulation, design and robotics. I reckon that move into robotics could be the most interesting one, especially for startups in our region who are hungry for tools that actually work in the physical world.

In return, Luma AI will also become one of the key customers of Humain’s Project Halo, a planned 2‑gigawatt AI supercluster in Saudi Arabia. That’s enormous by any global standard – and believe it or not, it would rank among the world’s largest compute infrastructure projects. As someone who’s spent years talking to founders through Arageek, I’ve heard more than a few complain about compute bottlenecks slowing them down. If Halo delivers even half of what’s promised, some of those headaches might finally ease… well, hopefully.

Humain’s CEO, Tareq Amin, put it plainly in the announcement: “Our investment in Luma AI, combined with HUMAIN’s 2GW supercluster, positions us to train, deploy, and scale multimodal intelligence at a frontier level. This partnership sets a new benchmark for how capital, compute, and capability come together.” On the flip side, it also signals how seriously Gulf investors are taking the race for AI sovereignty – ensuring models can reflect local cultures, values and linguistic nuance without relying entirely on foreign infrastructure.

That cultural dimension often gets overlooked. These upcoming models aim to understand not just what people say, but how they say it – the visual cues, the accents, the humour. I’ve always thought that’s where global AI systems sometimes fall short, especially when dealing with the layered identities across the MENA region. One small detail in the plan stood out: the focus on empowering creators, enterprises and even governments to adopt AI that mirrors their own identity rather than a generic global flavour. Chuffed to bits to see that being taken seriously at last.

All in all, this is a sizeable bet on the next generation of AI – and if nothing else, it shows the region isn’t sitting on the sidelines. Even if some parts of the vision sound a tad too grand on paper, the direction feels definately aligned with where the global ecosystem is heading.

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