AI video dark horse Luma AI closes $900 million funding round to build 2GW smart computing cluster

Early this morning, US-based AI video creatorLuma AIissued an announcement that it has completedUS$900 million (approximately RMB 6,397 million)of the Series Cfinancing.. According to sources, Luma AI has been valued at aroundUS$4 billion (approximately RMB 28.432 billion).

this round (of negotiations)financingLed by Humain, part of the Saudi Public Investment Fund (PIF), with existing investors Anderson Horowitz Fund, Amplify Partners and Matrix Partners following.

▲Luma AI official announcement tweet (Source: X)

In its official announcement, Luma AI wrote that the funding will support its development of advanced AI systems capable of learning from multiple data types, including video, audio and text.

In addition, Luma AI will work with investor Humain to build the2GWof the supercomputing cluster Project Halo for training and reasoning workloads. The compute cluster is scheduled forFirst quarter of 2026Deployment commenced and is expected to2028-2029Done.

The announcement also revealed that Luma AI believes that “AGI [generalized artificial intelligence] is multimodal, and reality is the dataset of AGI.”

They plan to “build intelligent universal models that will enable humans to design and simulate complex systems like rocket engines in a year (instead of a decade), allow small creative teams to make moving epic movies, give every child a world-class interactive teacher wherever they are, and lay the groundwork for a universal robot brain. ”

Luma AI was founded inSeptember 2021, whose technology is primarily used in industries such as entertainment, marketing and robotics to create photorealistic video content and aid creative workflows, and whose partners include mainstream technology companies such as Adobe, Amazon Cloud Services and NVIDIA.

Luma AI's flagship platform, Dream Machine, helps users generate professional-grade videos and images. In September, the company released Ray3, an inference model that creates video, animation and visual content.

According to Amit Jain, co-founder and CEO of the company, “Ray3 outperforms OpenAI's Sora in several benchmarks and performs on par with Google Veo 3.”

▲ Amit Jain, Co-Founder and CEO, Luma AI (Source: The Economic Times of India)

In an interview with India's Economic Times, Amit Jain, who used to work for Apple, said that the company is in a capital-intensive sector that requires large-scale investments for expansion.

Amit Jain said, “This funding is absolutely essential to realize the vision we are building.” He added, “In the early stages, we had to tackle a lot of core technologies first, so it would not be opportune to expand or raise large-scale funding until we have done that groundwork.”

Luma's main market is currently in North America. But Amit Jain says the company now wants to continue to expand into emerging markets such as India, which is in the early stages of development. We have a large number of studios in India, but they are usually small,“ he says. India has seen a number of interesting projects emerge in the generative video space, such as Ajay Devgn's production company Prismix.”

Conclusion: Luma AI aims to be “AGI”

According to the official announcement, Luma AI's goal has gone far beyond the hot Vincennes video tool of the moment, pointing straight to a more ambitious vision of AGI.

This round comes at a time when there are massive deals in the AI space. Capital is betting on the development of next-generation AI infrastructure and generalized models with unprecedented vigor.

Source: Luma AI, The Economic Times of India, X