Saudi Arabia has decided that “big” simply isn’t big enough. In its latest display of tech-powered ambition, the kingdom helped fuel a staggering $900 million liftoff for Luma AI—an American generative-intelligence startup now plugged directly into one of the most aggressive AI expansion plans on the planet.
At the heart of this surge is HUMAIN, the powerhouse backed by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund. HUMAIN led the monster Series C round, joined by AMD Ventures and a familiar lineup of blue-chip Silicon Valley investors. Their shared mission: push Luma AI toward building a multimodal intelligence system capable of understanding and interacting with the real world, not just the digital one.
But the money is only the spark.
HUMAIN is stitching together a joint venture with AMD, Cisco, and Luma to construct a colossal 1-gigawatt AI data centre inside the kingdom by 2030—an installation sized for a nation preparing to compete at superpower scale. The project feeds directly into HUMAIN’s even larger vision: Project Halo, a 2-gigawatt AI supercluster designed to train world models and build culturally aligned systems for the MENA region. Luma won’t just be a beneficiary of this new infrastructure—it will be one of its flagship customers.
The funding announcement, unveiled at the US–Saudi Investment Forum, ties Luma’s technology tightly into HUMAIN’s ecosystem. The startup plans to develop products capable of understanding and simulating reality for robotics, entertainment, gaming, advertising, and personalised learning—essentially, digital intelligence that behaves more like physical intuition.
And this was only one piece of a dealmaking avalanche.
During the Saudi Crown Prince’s high-stakes visit to the US, HUMAIN inked a slate of partnerships: a framework agreement with xAI to build low-cost GPU centres in the kingdom, a commitment to triple Saudi’s Groq-powered inference capacity, and a collaboration with Global AI to design high-density American data centres loaded with NVIDIA machines.
Amid these announcements, the Crown Prince doubled down on economic ties—pledging to ramp Saudi investment in the US to $1 trillion, a massive leap from previous commitments.
The kingdom isn’t just investing in AI.
It’s trying to reorder the global map of who builds the future—and who merely uses it.
