There’s a new heavyweight in town.

San Francisco–based Luma AI just raised $900 million in a Series C funding round led by Saudi Arabia’s HUMAIN, the AI arm backed by the Kingdom’s Public Investment Fund. 

That puts Luma’s valuation north of $4 billion and marks one of the biggest AI raises of the year.

If you haven’t heard of Luma yet, you will soon. 

The company’s ambition goes far beyond text generation. Their goal is to build a “multimodal general intelligence”.

That means they are working on an AI that can see, hear, understand, and create across every medium.

Their flagship tool, Dream Machine, lets users generate realistic video scenes from text prompts or images. 

It’s not perfect yet, but the speed of progress has stunned creators and investors alike. 

This round will pour fuel on that fire, both literally and figuratively.

Most of the AI boom so far has revolved around generative AI— text generation, coding, chatbots, image and video creation.

But Luma’s focus is different.

They’re building “world models”,  AIs trained on video, images, and audio that simulate how the real world works. 

This is the same kind of technology powering next-gen robotics, autonomous vehicles, and immersive digital content.

Here’s what makes this raise so important:

Luma will now be one of the first customers on HUMAIN’s Project Halo, a 2-gigawatt AI supercluster being built in Saudi Arabia. 

That’s enormous computing power. 

It signals a global race not just to train the smartest models, but to own the infrastructure that powers them.

And the geopolitical implications are huge. 

While the U.S. and China battle for AI dominance, Saudi Arabia is quietly carving out a third lane, pouring oil money into AI compute and data centers. 

This deal isn’t just about funding a startup. It’s about positioning a nation in the future AI economy.

For investors interested in the future of AI, this is a clear signal that the next big opportunity lies beyond generative AI.

The next phase will be visual, spatial, and interactive. 

It’s about AIs that can generate videos, simulate environments, and understand 3D space. 

This is the foundation for everything from gaming to robotics to marketing.

Think about what this could mean for creative industries. Marketing, filmmaking, and education will all feel the impact as video generation tools get smarter and cheaper. 

Early adopters will build new service models around these tools. Latecomers will be disrupted by them.

As we’ve said before, investing in AI isn’t just about chasing model names. 

It’s about spotting where the next wave of intelligence will form and positioning yourself to ride it. 

Luma’s massive raise shows that “world modeling” may be that next wave.