The News
Saudi Arabia’s state-backed artificial intelligence company HUMAIN has led a $900 million funding round for media production startup Luma AI — with the key commitment that a large part of the Silicon Valley firm’s data infrastructure will move to the kingdom.
As part of the agreement, HUMAIN will build a 2-gigawatt compute cluster known as Project Halo in Saudi Arabia with Luma AI as primary customer. Amit Jain, the chief executive of the US firm, said the cluster would be the largest of its type in the world.
“We need an immense amount of compute and we need to scale our research,” Jain said in an interview with Semafor. “With this funding, we plan to accelerate our path to building new models and building artificial general intelligence models.”
Other investors that joined the latest funding round, which valued the company at more than $4 billion, include AMD and Andreessen Horowitz, people familiar with the deal said.
Know More
Luma AI’s deal with HUMAIN is a vote of confidence in the kingdom’s strategy to use its abundant land and cheap energy to offer itself as a hub for AI companies looking for somewhere to handle large volumes of data processing — part of a broader Saudi push to drive domestic investment, rather than simply serve as a pool of capital for companies abroad.
The two companies have already agreed to cooperate on HUMAIN Create, which aims to use AI to quickly produce advertising, video games, and film. Luma AI will move more of its resources to Saudi Arabia and develop Arabic-language models as it looks to crack the Middle East market, Jain said.
“We think Saudi Arabia is going to be a very productive market for us, and with this partnership, we will unlock that in a very significant way,” Jain said.
The agreement was announced during Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s visit to the US to meet with President Donald Trump. Prince Mohammed committed Saudi Arabia to investing $1 trillion into the US during that trip, an increase of $400 billion from a previous pledge made just six months earlier.