Creator( )Laila Umaira
Release date •updated
Boosted by a $900 million funding round led by Saudi AI company HUMAIN in November, Luma AI’s growth momentum is just beginning.
Speaking to Euronews Next at Web Summit Qatar, CEO Amit Jain noted the rapid growth over the past year. Luma has grown from approximately 30 employees in early 2025 to more than 160 employees, adding 20 to 25 employees each month.
The company opened offices in London and Seattle.
But while the company is experiencing growing pains, expansion is a natural progression. “Startups that don’t grow shouldn’t exist,” Jain said.
Luma co-develops multimodal intelligence across language, voice, video, and images. In 2024, the company launched its flagship video generation platform, Dream Machine, which gained 1 million users in 4 days.
Last year, the Silicon Valley startup debuted Ray3, the world’s first inference video model. Since then, Ray3 has been updated several times to enhance its AI video generation capabilities.
To address the need for increased computing power, Luma is partnering with HUMAIN on Project Halo, a large-scale AI infrastructure initiative expected to reach up to 2 gigawatts of capacity by the early 2030s. This project also includes collaboration with NVIDIA and AMD.
“This is one of the largest infrastructure developments that we know of,” Jain said, putting it on the same level as the world’s largest AI lab.
Luma’s expansion in the Middle East also fills a gap in generative AI: a lack of cultural representation.
“AI is very good at generating what it sees,” he said. “But they don’t see enough Arabic expressions.”
Jain warned that as AI-generated content becomes cheaper and more widespread, underrepresented cultures risk disappearing from the digital record. “The history of our time will not exist in archeology,” he said. “It will be published on the Internet.”
Ruma is currently working with partners in Saudi Arabia to build what Jains say is the world’s first Arabic world model. He also pointed to broader opportunities for the Middle East, citing access to land, energy and capital.
“Energy will be the biggest bottleneck for AI,” he says. “The second bottleneck is converting that energy into computing.”
If these advantages are fully leveraged, Jain believes the region could become one of the world’s largest exporters of AI computing, becoming part of the world’s digital infrastructure in the same way oil was once part of the global economy.
