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Video generation startup Luma AI said it raised $900 million in a new funding round led by Humain, an artificial intelligence company owned by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund.
The financing, which included participation from Advanced Micro Devices’ venture arm and existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Amplify Partners and Matrix Partners, was announced at the U.S.-Saudi Investment Forum on Wednesday.
The company is now valued upwards of $4 billion, CNBC has confirmed.
Luma develops multimodal “world models” that are able to learn from not only text, but also video, audio and images in order to simulate reality. CEO Amit Jain told CNBC in an interview that these models expand beyond large language models, which are solely trained on text, to be more effective in “helping in the real, physical world.”
“With this funding, we plan to scale our and accelerate our efforts in training and then deploying these world models today,” Jain said.
Luma released Ray3 in September, the first reasoning video model that can interpret prompts to create videos, images and audio. Jain said Ray3 currently benchmarks higher than OpenAI’s Sora 2 and around the same level as Google’s Veo 3.
Humain, which was launched in May, is aiming to deliver full-stack AI capabilities to bolster Saudi Arabia’s position as a global AI hub. The company is led by industry veteran Tareq Amin, who previously ran Aramco Digital and before that was CEO of Rakuten Mobile.
Luma and Humain will also partner to build a 2-gigawatt AI supercluster, dubbed Project Halo, in Saudi Arabia. The buildout will be one of the one of the largest deployments of graphic processing units (GPUs) in the world, Jain said.
Major tech companies have been investing in supercomputers across the globe to train massive AI models. In July, Meta announced plans to build a 1-gigawatt supercluster called Prometheus, and Microsoft deployed the first supercomputing 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 release. “This partnership sets a new benchmark for how capital, compute, and capability come together.”
The collaboration also includes Humain Create, an initiative to create sovereign AI models trained on Arabic and regional data. Along with focusing on building the world’s first Arabic video model, Jain said Luma models and capabilities will be deployed to Middle Eastern businesses.
He added that 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.
“It’s really important that we bring these cultures, their identities, their representation — visual and behavioral and everything — to our model,” Jain said.
AI-generated content tools have received significant backlash over the past year from entertainment studios over copyright concerns. Luma’s flagship text-to-video platform Dream Machine garnered some accusations of copying IP earlier this year, but Jain the company has installed safeguards to prevent unwanted usage.
“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.”
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