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The US-based artificial generative intelligence start-up Luma AI has raised $900 million in a Series C funding round led by HUMAIN, an AI firm owned by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, with participation from AMD Ventures, and existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Amplify Partners, and Matrix Partners.
The capital and compute infrastructure will accelerate Luma AI’s path towards building a multimodal artificial general intelligence model - AI that can generate, understand, and operate in the physical world.
HUMAIN’s JV with AMD, Cisco and Luma will see the rollout of a mega data centre with 1GW AI infrastructure by 2030 in the kingdom.
Luma AI said the new funding, which was announced during the US- Saudi Investment Forum, will accelerate its plans to build products in HUMAIN that understand and simulate reality for robotics, entertainment, advertising, gaming, and personalised education.
Luma AI will become a customer of HUMAIN, which is building Project Halo, a 2-gigawatt AI supercluster in Saudi Arabia for training world models and developing culturally aligned AI for the MENA region.
AI dealmaking surge
HUMAIN was at the centre of a series of partnerships announced during Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman Al Saud’s visit to the US, which included a partnership with Elon Musk’s xAI where the two companies signed a framework agreement to build low-cost GPU data centres in Saudi.
A Groq deal also saw HUMAIN agree to triple Saudi Arabia’s Groq-powered inference capacity.
In a flurry of infrastructure announcements, HUMAIN and Global AI will develop high-density AI data centres in the US featuring NVIDIA infrastructure.
During his meeting with US President Donald Trump, the Saudi Crown Prince pledged to increase Saudi investments in the US to $1 trillion from the $600 billion announced when Trump visited Saudi in May.
(Writing by Bindu Rai, editing by Seban Scaria)
