Video-generation startup Luma AI has secured $900 million in fresh funding, a blockbuster round led by Humain, a new artificial intelligence company owned by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund.
The move places both companies squarely in the race to build next-generation multimodal AI systems and the computing muscle needed to run them.
The financing was announced at the U.S.-Saudi Investment Forum on Wednesday and included participation from AMD’s venture arm, along with existing backers Andreessen Horowitz, Amplify Partners, and Matrix Partners. CNBC confirmed that the funding round values Luma at more than $4 billion, a steep climb for a company built around “world models” that learn from video, audio, images, and text.
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Luma CEO Amit Jain said the capital will significantly accelerate the company’s ability to train and deploy these models, which he describes as essential for AI systems that operate in the real world. Speaking in an interview with CNBC, Jain said Luma’s approach goes beyond traditional large language models, which are limited to text training.
“With this funding, we plan to scale and accelerate our efforts in training and then deploying these world models today,” he said.
The company has been ramping up product development, releasing Ray3 in September — a reasoning video model capable of interpreting complex prompts to generate video, audio, and images. According to Jain, Ray3 currently benchmarks above OpenAI’s Sora 2 and performs around the same level as Google’s Veo 3, two of the most advanced commercial video-generation systems.
The Saudi-led push behind the funding underscores the kingdom’s ambition to position itself as a global hub for artificial intelligence. Humain, launched in May and led by Tareq Amin, the former chief executive of Rakuten Mobile and ex-head of Aramco Digital, aims to build end-to-end AI infrastructure and model capabilities that can compete globally.
The partnership between Luma and Humain includes one of the most aggressive compute buildouts announced so far. Both companies will collaborate on Project Halo, a 2-gigawatt AI supercluster planned for Saudi Arabia, which Jain described as one of the world’s largest GPU deployments. The move comes amid a global scramble for advanced chips such as Nvidia’s AI accelerators, with big tech companies racing to assemble the data-center horsepower needed to train larger and larger models.
Saudi Arabia’s investment follows similar moves from major U.S. tech players. Meta announced in July that it would build a 1-gigawatt supercluster known as Prometheus, and Microsoft deployed the first GPU cluster using the Nvidia GB300 NVL72 platform in October.
“Our investment in Luma AI, combined with HUMAIN’s 2GW supercluster, positions us to train, deploy, and scale multimodal intelligence at a frontier level,” Amin said in a statement. “This partnership sets a new benchmark for how capital, compute, and capability come together.”
The collaboration will also support Humain Create, an effort to build sovereign Arabic-language AI models trained on regional data sources. Jain said the initiative includes ambitions to develop the world’s first Arabic video-generation model, addressing a long-running issue in AI training: non-Western cultures and languages are not properly represented in most of today’s foundation models.
“Since most models are trained by scraping data from the internet, countries outside the U.S. and Asia are often less represented in AI-generated content,” Jain said. “It’s really important that we bring these cultures, their identities, their representation — visual and behavioral and everything — to our model.”
Luma’s rapid growth has also drawn scrutiny. Dream Machine, its flagship text-to-video platform, faced allegations earlier this year of reproducing copyrighted material. Jain said the company has deployed strong safeguards to prevent unwanted content generation and continues to refine those systems.
“Even if you really try to trick it, we are constantly improving it,” he said. “We have built very robust systems that are actually using models we trained to detect them.”
The latest round cements Luma AI as one of the most heavily funded startups in the video-AI race and underlines Saudi Arabia’s deepening push into artificial intelligence as it spends aggressively to diversify its economy.