What happened
Humain, a Saudi Arabian unit, led a $900 million Series C funding round for Luma AI, valuing the US-based startup at approximately $4 billion. This investment accelerates Luma AI's development of advanced multimodal AI systems and foundational "World Models". Luma AI will now utilise Humain's 2-gigawatt Project Halo AI supercluster in Saudi Arabia, gaining infrastructure to train models on peta-scale multimodal data, exceeding current large language model capabilities. The funding supports Luma's AI systems learning from video, audio, and text, and advances research for its Ray3 model. Humain Create will also develop AI models trained on Arabic and regional data.
Why it matters
This investment introduces a new operational dependency on a 2-gigawatt AI supercluster located in Saudi Arabia for peta-scale multimodal data training. This significantly increases due diligence requirements for data governance and sovereignty, particularly for organisations utilising Luma AI's advanced models. The expanded scope of AI systems learning from diverse data types, including video and audio, raises exposure for compliance and IT security teams to potential data provenance and handling complexities within a new jurisdictional framework. This also creates a visibility gap regarding the specific controls applied to data processing within the Project Halo infrastructure.
