Publicis Groupe Middle East Named Preferred AI Creative Partner as Saudi Arabia Positions for Generative AI Infrastructure Leadership
Luma AI, the frontier artificial intelligence company developing multimodal AGI systems, will open a dedicated office in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, marking its first Middle East regional hub and accelerating development of what the company describes as the world’s first Saudi-built, Arabic-native foundation model. The expansion supports Luma AI’s partnership with HUMAIN, Saudi Arabia’s generative AI initiative, while establishing infrastructure for client engagement, partnerships, and advanced AI development across MENA. Simultaneously, Luma AI announced a strategic partnership with Publicis Groupe Middle East, positioning the AI company as Publicis’s preferred generative AI technology partner for creative and production workflows across the region.
The dual announcements signal Saudi Arabia’s ambition to build domestic AI infrastructure rather than solely consuming Western-developed models. Through HUMAIN Create, Luma AI’s models will be trained on Arabic language and regional data, enabling public and private sector creators to deploy AI systems that reflect local language nuances, cultural context, and creative requirements—capabilities generic multilingual models struggle to deliver at production quality.
Why Arabic-Native Foundation Models Require Regional Development
Most foundation models treat Arabic as one language among dozens in multilingual training datasets, resulting in systems that understand formal Modern Standard Arabic but perform inconsistently with dialectal variations, cultural references, and domain-specific terminology prevalent across MENA markets. For creative applications—advertising, entertainment, brand communications—these gaps undermine output quality and cultural relevance.
Building Arabic-native models requires more than translating English training data. It demands datasets reflecting how Arabic is actually used across contexts: Gulf dialects versus Levantine versus North African variations, code-switching between Arabic and English, visual-cultural associations specific to the region, and creative conventions that don’t translate directly from Western advertising frameworks.
HUMAIN Create provides the infrastructure to support this development. The platform brings together advanced AI models, tools, and training capacity, backed by Project Halo—a large-scale 2GW AI supercluster under development in Saudi Arabia designed to provide frontier training and inference capacity for next-generation generative AI applications.
“Saudi Arabia is the natural home for our regional headquarters in MENA. The Kingdom has one of the most ambitious and technically capable workforces in the world,” 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.”
Key Insights at a Glance
- Regional headquarters: Riyadh office serves as MENA hub for client engagement, partnerships, and Arabic-native AI development through HUMAIN Create platform
- Hiring plans: Local recruitment across AI/software engineering, go-to-market leadership, and forward-deployed creative/technical teams working with customers and partners
- Infrastructure backing: Project Halo 2GW AI supercluster under development to provide frontier training and inference capacity for generative AI at scale
- Publicis partnership scope: Luma AI named preferred generative AI technology partner for Publicis Groupe Middle East across Saudi Arabia and broader MENA region
- Creative workflow integration: Publicis will embed Luma AI’s generative video and multimodal AI technologies into production systems for faster, culturally relevant advertising
From Content Consumption to AI Production Infrastructure
Saudi Arabia’s investment in domestic AI development infrastructure reflects strategic positioning beyond oil economy diversification. While many countries focus on AI adoption—implementing existing models developed elsewhere—the Kingdom is building capacity to develop, train, and deploy proprietary models aligned with national priorities and regional market requirements.
This approach addresses a strategic vulnerability: dependence on AI systems developed in other geographies using datasets, cultural assumptions, and design priorities that may not align with regional needs or national interests. For creative industries, government communications, and culturally sensitive applications, locally developed models offer advantages beyond technical performance—they provide control over training data, deployment policies, and capability evolution.
“This new office marks a major step forward in deepening our collaboration with Luma AI,” said Tareq Amin, CEO of HUMAIN. “Through HUMAIN Create, we are accelerating the development of Arabic-native, culturally fluent AI systems that enable creators, brands, and organizations across the region.”
The 2GW Project Halo supercluster represents infrastructure investment at a scale typically associated with hyperscale cloud providers or national research initiatives. This compute capacity enables training runs for large-scale multimodal models—the resource-intensive foundation underlying generative video, image synthesis, and advanced language understanding capabilities.
Publicis Partnership Tests Enterprise Generative AI Workflow Integration
The strategic partnership with Publicis Groupe Middle East provides a production-scale testbed for how generative AI integrates into creative workflows where quality, brand consistency, and cultural appropriateness cannot be sacrificed for speed or cost reduction.
Advertising agencies face a specific challenge with generative AI: the technology promises dramatic productivity improvements, but creative output must meet brand standards, cultural sensitivity requirements, and regulatory constraints that generic AI systems don’t inherently respect. Point-solution AI tools optimize individual tasks—script generation, visual concepting, video editing—but struggle with end-to-end workflow integration where brand guidelines, legal approvals, and cultural review processes govern output.
“This partnership reflects how we see the future of creativity in the region, where generative AI is not an add-on but embedded at the heart of how ideas are conceived, produced, and scaled,” said Bassel Kakish, CEO of Publicis Groupe Middle East & Turkey. “By partnering with Luma AI and HUMAIN, we are accelerating transformation across our creative systems, enabling our teams to deliver more ambitious, culturally grounded, and technologically advanced work.”
Embedding Luma AI’s generative video and multimodal capabilities directly into Publicis’s production infrastructure—rather than treating them as separate tools—tests whether AI can become operational infrastructure rather than experimental technology. For Publicis clients across MENA, this means creative campaigns theoretically produced faster and personalized across markets while maintaining cultural relevance and brand consistency.
Strategic Implications Beyond Creative Industries
While the Publicis partnership focuses on advertising and creative production, the underlying infrastructure serves broader applications. Arabic-native foundation models enable government communications, educational content, entertainment production, and enterprise applications across sectors where language quality and cultural alignment directly impact effectiveness.
“Advertising is entering a new era where creativity, intelligence, and production converge,” said Jason Day, Head of EMEA at Luma AI. “Partnering with Publicis Groupe Middle East and HUMAIN allows us to embed generative video and multimodal AI directly into the creative process, unlocking speed, scale, and creative ambition for brands across MENA, while building AI systems that truly understand the region.”
As global AI development concentrates in the United States and China, Saudi Arabia’s investment in domestic infrastructure and Arabic-native models represents a third path: regional AI ecosystems built around linguistic, cultural, and strategic requirements that don’t align neatly with systems optimized for English or Mandarin. Whether this approach produces models competitive with Western or Chinese alternatives at technical benchmarks matters less than whether they deliver superior performance for Arabic-language applications where cultural context determines quality. The Riyadh office and Publicis partnership will provide early indicators of which outcome materializes.
About Luma AI
Luma AI is building multimodal general intelligence that can generate, understand, and operate in the physical world. Its flagship platform, Dream Machine, enables creatives everywhere to generate professional-grade video and images. In 2025, Luma released Ray3, the world’s first reasoning video model capable of creating physically accurate videos, animations, and visuals. Luma’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. The company is backed by HUMAIN, Andreessen Horowitz, Amazon, AMD Ventures, NVIDIA, Amplify Partners, Matrix Partners, and angels from across technology and entertainment.
About Publicis Groupe Middle East & Turkey
Publicis Groupe Middle East & Turkey (ME&T) is a regional leader in communication, media, marketing and digital business transformation. Through its world-class brands and the ability to architect, build and orchestrate end-to-end solutions, Publicis Groupe ME&T is uniquely positioned to help clients unlock growth in the platform world through the intersection of data, creativity, media and technology. Headquartered in Dubai, UAE but present across eight markets across the Middle East and North Africa, Publicis Groupe ME&T brings together 3,600 minds with expertise in data, technology, media, strategy, creativity and business transformation.
About HUMAIN
HUMAIN, a PIF company, is a global artificial intelligence company delivering full-stack AI capabilities across four core areas: next-generation data centers; hyper-performance infrastructure and cloud platforms; advanced AI models, including some of the world’s most advanced Arabic large language models developed in the Arab world; and transformative AI solutions that combine deep sector insight with real-world execution.
HUMAIN’s end-to-end model serves both public and private sector organizations, unlocking value across industries, driving digital transformation, and strengthening capabilities through human–AI collaboration. With a growing portfolio of sector-specific AI products and a core mission focused on intellectual property development and global talent leadership, HUMAIN is engineered for international competitiveness and technological excellence.
