Brands
Luma powers up with massive 900m dollar raise
MUMBAI: Reality just got a serious upgrade. Luma AI has flicked the switch on one of the year’s biggest tech fundraises, securing 900 million dollars in Series C financing and plugging itself into a colossal new compute partnership that could reshape how artificial intelligence learns, reasons and interacts with the physical world.
The round is led by Humain, a PIF company building full stack AI systems, with additional backing from AMD Ventures and returning investors Andreessen Horowitz, Amplify Partners and Matrix Partners. The new capital and access to frontier level compute put Luma on a faster track towards multimodal AGI, a form of intelligence designed to generate, understand and operate across video, image, audio and language.
At the heart of the partnership is Project Halo, a planned 2 gigawatt AI supercluster in Saudi Arabia that will become one of the world’s largest compute infrastructure builds. Luma will become an anchor customer as the companies jointly push forward the next generation of world models, AI systems trained on peta scale multimodal data that far exceed the breadth and depth of today’s leading language models.
Speaking on the announcement, Luma AI CEO and co founder Amit Jain said, Humain brings the scale, speed and ambition needed to train systems on a quadrillion tokens of information drawn from humanity’s digital footprint. He noted that the expanded collaboration covers customised models, go to market efforts and deployment pipelines to build an end to end value chain for multimodal intelligence.
Humain CEO Tareq Amin said, the investment reflects the company’s strategy of funding and building the AI value chain simultaneously. He described Luma as a frontier startup whose research velocity and ability to ship real products align with Humain’s vision for global scale AI capabilities powered by the upcoming 2 gigawatt cluster.
Luma’s flagship model, Ray3, is already used across studios, brands and agencies worldwide and is integrated into Adobe’s products. With fresh investment and compute capacity, the company plans to expand from entertainment and advertising into simulation, design and robotics.
The partnership also extends to Humain Create, an initiative to develop sovereign AI models trained on Arabic and regional data. These models aim to bring cultural nuance, linguistic depth and visual context to governments, enterprises and creators across the Middle East and North Africa.
For an industry racing to simulate the real world, this funding is more than just fuel. It is a signal that the next era of AI will be shaped not only by clever algorithms but by oceans of data and superclusters built to power intelligence at planetary scale.
Brands
Apple bites back: the $599 MacBook Neo is the cheapest Mac ever made
The tech giant unveils a budget laptop that packs a punch — and a lot of cheek
CALIFORNIA: Apple has never been shy about charging a premium. So when Cupertino rolls out a MacBook at $599 (approx. Rs 55,000) , it’s worth sitting up straight.
The MacBook Neo, unveiled Tuesday, is Apple’s most affordable laptop to date — undercutting its own MacBook Air and taking a sharp swipe at the budget PC market in one fell swoop. It starts at $499 for students, which, for a machine with Apple silicon inside, is frankly a steal.
At the heart of the Neo is the A18 Pro chip — the same muscle that powers the latest iPhones. Apple claims it is up to 50 per cent faster for everyday tasks than a rival PC running Intel’s Core Ultra 5, and three times quicker on on-device AI workloads. Fanless and featherweight at 2.7 pounds, it runs silently and promises up to 16 hours of battery life. Try doing that on a Chromebook.
The 13-inch liquid retina display clocks in at 2408-by-1506 resolution with 500 nits of brightness and support for billion colours — sharper and brighter, Apple says, than most rivals in this price band. It comes dressed in four colours: blush, indigo, silver, and a zesty new citrus, with matching keyboard shades to boot.
Connectivity is modest — two USB-C ports, a headphone jack, Wi-Fi 6E, and Bluetooth 6 — but this is a budget machine, not a pro workstation. The 1080p FaceTime camera, dual mics with directional beamforming, and Spatial Audio speakers round out a package that punches well above its weight class.
Apple senior vice-president of hardware engineering John Ternus alled it “a laptop only Apple could create.” That’s the kind of line that makes rivals wince — because, annoyingly, he might be right.
The Neo runs macOS Tahoe, with Apple Intelligence baked in for AI writing tools, live translation, and the sort of on-device smarts that keep user data away from the cloud. It also boasts 60 per cent recycled content — the highest of any Apple product — for those who like their bargains with a side of conscience.
For $599, Apple isn’t just selling a laptop. It’s selling an argument — that good design and real performance needn’t cost the earth. The PC industry had better have a decent comeback ready.
