Luma AI, A Growing Startup With Hollywood Ties, Raises $900M To Build “Supercluster” In Saudi Arabia

Luma AI, a growing California startup with ties to Hollywood, has raised $900 million in Series C funding, which it plans to use to fund a “supercluster” facility in Saudi Arabia.

The funding round was led by Humain, which is part of the portfolio of the Saudi Private Investment Fund. The financing and project were announced Wednesday in Washington, D.C., at the U.S.-Saudi Investment Forum.

Investment in the U.S. economy by the Saudis was a key theme of Crown Prince HRH Mohammad bin Salman Al-Saud’s visit to Washington this week. On Tuesday evening, after meeting the crown prince in the White House (a sit-down that featured a testy exchange with an ABC News reporter), President Trump hosted guests including Paramount CEO David Ellison at a black-tie dinner in the Saudi royal’s honor. Ellison’s attendance symbolized the increasing overlap between Mideast wealth funds and the entertainment business.

The companies say Project Halo, a 2-gigawatt supercluster being built in the desert nation, is “one of the world’s largest compute infrastructure buildouts.”

Along with Humain, the funding round included what the companies called “significant participation” from chipmaker AMD, and further investments from existing backers Andreessen Horowitz, Amplify Partners and Matrix Partners.

Luma AI said the new funding and infrastructure will accelerate its efforts to train large-scale AI models. The company is aiming to create systems that transcend large-language models and learn from humanity’s digital footprint in video, audio, and language. The company’s products will “understand and simulate reality” in robotics, entertainment, advertising, gaming, and education at a global scale, Luma says.

Luma CEO Amit Jain called Humain “the perfect partner for this next stage in Luma’s explosive trajectory.” He said the beefed-up infrastructure is needed so that systems can assess “a quadrillion tokens of information – roughly the collective digital memory of humanity – contained in video, image, audio, and language.”

Earlier this year, Luma opened its “Dream Lab” studio in Los Angeles and also launched Ray3, its new generative AI video model. Last month, the company teamed with Kevin Hart’s production outfit Hartbeat on Prompt Side Story, a “live AI film battle” in which comedians and content creators made competing short films in real time with the help of AI.