Luma AI is planting a strategic flag in the Middle East.
The multimodal AI company announced it will open a dedicated office in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, expanding its regional footprint while deepening its partnership with HUMAIN to accelerate development of Arabic-native generative AI systems. At the same time, Luma AI unveiled a strategic partnership with Publicis Groupe Middle East, positioning itself as the preferred generative AI technology partner for the agency network across MENA.
Together, the moves signal Luma AI’s ambition to anchor itself at the intersection of AI infrastructure, regional language models, and creative industries.
Riyadh as a Regional AI Hub
Luma AI’s new Riyadh office will serve as a regional headquarters supporting client engagement, partnerships, and advanced AI development across the Middle East and North Africa.
Central to the expansion is the company’s collaboration with HUMAIN Create, HUMAIN’s generative AI initiative. Through this partnership, Luma AI is contributing to the development of what is described as the world’s first Saudi-built, Arabic-native foundation model, trained on Arabic language and regionally relevant datasets.
For Luma AI, this is not simply geographic expansion—it is model localization at scale.
“Saudi Arabia is the natural home for our regional headquarters in MENA,” said Amit Jain, CEO and Co-Founder of Luma AI. “Establishing a local office allows Luma AI to work directly with this next generation of builders and creators, while developing AI that is deeply connected to the region it serves.”
The company plans to hire locally across AI engineering, software development, go-to-market roles, and forward-deployed creative and technical teams working directly with regional partners.
Arabic-Native AI and Cultural Context
One of the persistent challenges in generative AI is linguistic and cultural nuance. Many frontier models are optimized primarily for English, leaving gaps in contextual accuracy for Arabic dialects and region-specific content.
Through HUMAIN Create, Luma AI’s models will be trained on Arabic and regional data, aiming to deliver systems that reflect local language, culture, and creative context.
According to HUMAIN CEO Tareq Amin, the collaboration is backed by Project Halo, a planned 2GW AI supercluster in Saudi Arabia designed to provide large-scale training and inference capacity for next-generation AI systems.
“Our collaboration with Luma AI is supported by frontier compute through Project Halo,” Amin said. “Together, we are redefining how intelligence, creativity, and scale come together in the next era of AI-driven content.”
If executed successfully, the initiative could position Saudi Arabia as a key center for Arabic-language foundation model development—an increasingly strategic priority as nations seek sovereign AI capabilities.
Publicis Partnership Embeds AI into Creative Workflows
Beyond infrastructure and model development, Luma AI is moving aggressively into the creative economy.
Under a new partnership with Publicis Groupe Middle East, Luma AI will serve as the preferred generative AI technology partner for the agency group across Saudi Arabia and the broader MENA region.
The collaboration will integrate Luma AI’s generative video and multimodal AI technologies directly into advertising and production workflows. The goal: enabling faster, more personalized, and culturally relevant campaigns across markets and channels.
“This partnership reflects how we see the future of creativity in the region,” said Bassel Kakish, CEO of Publicis Groupe Middle East & Turkey. “Generative AI is not an add-on but embedded at the heart of how ideas are conceived, produced, and scaled.”
Jason Day, Head of EMEA at Luma AI, framed the move as part of a broader transformation in advertising.
“Advertising is entering a new era where creativity, intelligence, and production converge,” he said. “Partnering with Publicis Groupe Middle East and HUMAIN allows us to embed generative video and multimodal AI directly into the creative process.”
A Broader AI Strategy in MENA
Luma AI’s expansion reflects a larger trend: the Middle East, and Saudi Arabia in particular, is rapidly investing in AI infrastructure, sovereign compute, and applied AI ecosystems.
By combining:
- Local office presence
- Arabic-native model development
- Access to large-scale compute via Project Halo
- Direct integration into regional creative industries
Luma AI is positioning itself not only as a model provider, but as a long-term ecosystem partner.
The move also underscores a growing shift in AI strategy—from exporting Western-trained models into new markets, toward building regionally grounded AI systems with local data, talent, and cultural fluency.
As generative AI increasingly shapes media, marketing, and digital production, embedding these systems into local creative economies may prove as strategically important as model performance benchmarks.
For Luma AI, Riyadh is more than a new address. It is a statement about where the next phase of AI growth is unfolding.
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