Luma AI raises $900 million in funding round led by Saudi AI firm Humain
Thomas Fuller | SOPA Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images
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.”
Jensen Huang, chief executive officer of Nvidia Corp., during the US-Saudi Investment Forum at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, US, on Wednesday, Nov. 19, 2025.
Stefani Reynolds | Bloomberg | Getty Images
In the weeks leading up to Nvidia’s third-quarter earnings report, investors debated whether the markets were in an AI bubble, fretting over the massive sums being committed to building data centers and whether they could provide a long-term return on investment.
During Wednesday’s earnings call with analysts, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang began his comments by rejecting that premise.
“There’s been a lot of talk about an AI bubble,” Huang said. “From our vantage point we see something very different.”
In many respects, Huang’s remarks are to be expected. He’s leading the company at the heart of the artificial intelligence boom, and has built its market cap to $4.5 trillion because of soaring demand for Nvidia’s graphics processing units.
Huang’s smackdown of bubble talk matters because Nvidia counts every major cloud provider — Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Oracle — as a customer. Most of the major AI model developers, including OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI and Meta, are also big buyers of Nvidia GPUs.
Huang has deep visibility into the market, and on the call he offered a three-pronged argument for why we’re not in a bubble.
First, he said that areas like data processing, ad recommendations, search systems, and engineering, are turning to GPUs because they need the AI. That means older computing infrastructure based around the central processor will transition to new systems running on Nvidia’s chips.
Second, Huang said, AI isn’t just being integrated into current applications, but it will enable entirely new ones.
Finally, according to Huang, “agentic AI,” or applications that can run without significant input from the user, will be able to reason and plan, and will require even more computing power.
In making the case of Nvidia, Huang said it’s the only company that can address the three use cases.
“As you consider infrastructure investments, consider these three fundamental dynamics,” Huang said. “Each will contribute to infrastructure growth in the coming years.”
Reversing the slide
In its earnings release, Nvidia reported revenue and profit that sailed past estimates and issued better-than-expected guidance. Last month, Huang provided a $500 billion forecast for sales of the company’s AI chips over calendar 2025 and 2026.
The company said on Wednesday that its order backlog didn’t even include a few recent deals, like an agreement with Anthropic that was announced this week or the expansion of a deal with Saudi Arabia.
“The number will grow,” CFO Colette Kress said on the call, saying the company was on track to hit the forecast.
Prior to Wednesday’s results, Nvidia shares were down about 8% this month. Other stocks tied to the AI have gotten hit even harder, with CoreWeave plunging 44% in November, Oracle dropping 14% and Palantir falling 17%.
Some of the worry on Wall Street has been tied to the debt that certain companies have used to finance their infrastructure buildouts.
“Our customers’ financing is up to them,” Huang said.
Specific to Nvidia, investors have raised concerns in recent weeks about how much of the company’s sales were going to a small number of hyperscalers.
Last month, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon and Alphabet all lifted their forecasts for capital expenditures due to their AI buildouts, and now collectively expect to spend more than $380 billion this year.
Huang said that even without a new business model, Nvidia’s chips boost hyperscaler revenue, because they power recommendation systems for short videos, books, and ads.
People will soon start appreciating what’s happening underneath the surface of the AI boom, Huang said, versus “the simplistic view of what’s happening to capex and investment.”
WATCH: Nvidia posts Q3 beat
Technology
Asian chip names rally as Nvidia forecasts hotter-than-expected sales after earnings beat
-
Sports2 years agoStory injured on diving stop, exits Red Sox game
-
Sports3 years ago‘Storybook stuff’: Inside the night Bryce Harper sent the Phillies to the World Series
-
Sports2 years agoGame 1 of WS least-watched in recorded history
-
Sports3 years agoButton battles heat exhaustion in NASCAR debut
-
Sports3 years agoMLB Rank 2023: Ranking baseball’s top 100 players
-
Sports4 years ago
Team Europe easily wins 4th straight Laver Cup
-
Environment2 years agoJapan and South Korea have a lot at stake in a free and open South China Sea
-
Environment1 year agoHere are the best electric bikes you can buy at every price level in October 2024