Luma AI to open Riyadh office for Arabic AI development
Publicis names Luma AI preferred MENA creative partner
#SaudiArabia #entertainment – AI entertainment startup Luma AI is to open a Riyadh office, signalling expansion in the Middle East and supporting its initiative with Public Investment Fund-owned AI company HUMAIN: HUMAIN Create. The company also announced a strategic partnership with communications leader Publicis Groupe Middle East, under which Luma AI will serve as the preferred generative AI technology partner across the region. The Riyadh office will support ongoing development of the world’s first Saudi-built, Arabic-native foundation model via HUMAIN Create, alongside client engagement and partnerships, with Luma AI planning to hire locally across AI engineering, software development, go-to-market leadership and forward-deployed creative roles.
SO WHAT? – HUMAIN and Luma AI announced HUMAIN Create initiative at the annual creative and advertising event Cannes Lions last summer. The collaboration promises to combines Luma’s Ray2 video generation technology with HUMAIN’s Arabic-enabled models and full-stack AI infrastructure to deliver culturally-adapted creative content at unprecedented scale. Luma AI’s new office in Riyadh stands to accelerate the joint initiative and allow the company to develop other opportunities such as the new partnership with Publicis Groupe Middle East.
Here are some key points about Luma AI’s Middle East expansion:
AI entertainment startup Luma AI is to open a Riyadh office, signalling expansion in the Middle East and supporting its initiative with Public Investment Fund-owned AI company HUMAIN: HUMAIN Create.
Luma AI’s flagship platform Dream Machine enables professional-grade video and image generation, whilst Ray3, released in 2025, represents the world’s first reasoning video model capable of creating physically accurate videos, animations and visuals.
The company’s models are used by leading entertainment studios, advertising agencies and technology partners worldwide, including Adobe and AWS, and are available via subscription or API for creative production applications.
Through HUMAIN Create, Luma AI’s models will be trained on Arabic language and regional data, enabling creators in the public and private sectors to adopt AI systems that reflect local language, culture and creative context across Saudi Arabia and MENA markets.
The collaboration between Luma AI and HUMAIN is supported by Project Halo, a large-scale 2GW AI supercluster under development in Saudi Arabia that will provide frontier training and inference capacity to power next-generation generative AI applications at scale.
Publicis Groupe Middle East, present across eight markets in the Middle East and North Africa with 3,600 employees, will integrate Luma AI’s advanced generative video and multimodal AI technologies into creative workflows for brands across the region.
ZOOM OUT – Luma AI announced the closing of its $900 million Series C funding round in November 2025, led by HUMAIN with participation from AMD Ventures and existing US venture investors Andreessen Horowitz, Amplify Partners and Matrix Partners. That investment secured Luma AI as the first customer for 100MW of compute capacity from HUMAIN's $10 billion joint venture with US chipmaker AMD, supporting Project Halo, a planned 2GW AI supercluster in Saudi Arabia. The funding and infrastructure access position Luma AI amongst the best-funded multimodal AI start-ups globally. Meanwhile, the AI startup’s move to Riyadh validates Saudi Arabia's strategy of aligning capital, sovereign-scale compute and frontier model developers to build next-generation AI infrastructure and applications.
[Written and edited with the assistance of AI]
Read more about Luma AI and HUMAIN:
Luma AI secures $900M in Series C round led by HUMAIN (Middle East AI News)
HUMAIN & Luma AI to drive a creative revolution (Middle East AI News)