AI start-up Luma AI raises US$900m to build ‘AI supercluster’ in Saudi Arabia

US-based generative AI company Luma AI has raised US$900m in funding from multiple investors to finance what it describes as an “AI supercluster” facility in the Middle East.

Amit Jain

The Series C funding round is led by tech company Humain, with participation from AMD Ventures and existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Amplify Partners and Matrix Partners.

It will fund Project Halo, a two-gigawatt AI supercluster in Saudi Arabia, with Luma claiming it will help accelerate the company’s path to multimodal artificial general intelligence, which it describes as “AI that can simulate reality and help humans in the physical world.”

The project was announced in Washington DC at the US-Saudi Investment Forum, attended by the Crown Prince HRH Mohammad bin Salman Al-Saud.

California start-up Luma claims Project Halo is “one of the world’s largest compute infrastructures buildouts.”

Luma has previously released products such as its flagship platform Dream Machine, which generates photorealistic video and images from simple prompts, and this year’s Ray2, a video generative model. In July, Luma rolled out Dream Lab LA, a venture it claims will help creatives combine groundbreaking tech with filmmaking expertise.

Amit Jain, CEO and co-founder of Luma AI, said: “Humain is the perfect partner for this next stage in Luma AI’s explosive trajectory. To create AI that can help humanity in the physical world and expand our understanding of the universe, we need to build systems that can learn from a quadrillion tokens of information – roughly the collective digital memory of humanity – contained in video, image, audio and language.

“Humain is deploying frontier compute infrastructure at impressive speed, and this is critical to achieving Luma AI’s mission. We are also partnering deeply across customised models, go-to-market, and deployment of frontier capabilities to build a full end-to-end value chain for multimodal AI.”

Humain CEO Tareq Amin added: “This investment underscores an important point in Humain’s philosophy: we are not only funding the next wave of AI, we’re building the full value chain that makes it possible.”