These days, entrepreneurial sorts are likely to flee entertainment for the booming pastures of AI. Anita Verma-Lallian is going the other way.
The Arizona real-estate developer, 43, has been developing land across the Grand Canyon State for data centers for several years, cashing in on tech companies’ voracious need for spaces to power their AI operations.
But instead of taking the profits and doing something responsible like, say, launching a startup, she’s decided to spend the money on something less 2025-intuitive: pouring it into film productions and even a potential massive studio backlot in her home state. “Seeing success in that [AI data] space has given us an opportunity to feed another passion, feed something a little more creative,” she tells THR.
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That means using the profits to fund Camelback Productions, a company that backed recent sex comedy Doin’ It, starring Lilly Singh. It’s also behind the Kal Penn movie Patel and Prima Facie, a Cynthia Erivo-starring project based on a West End and Broadway play about a complicated barrister.
On the backlot end, Verma-Lallian is in the process of accumulating some 1,500 acres west of Phoenix on which she also aims to include retail and entertainment options. The site’s placement near a freeway, she says, allows for a quick zip back to Southern California for cast and crew, with Phoenix six hours down the 10 (on a good day). She hopes some newish tax incentives, varied climate and loose union laws will also compel producers to put Arizona on the list alongside New Mexico in the Southwest.
Raised in Chicago by Indian immigrant parents, Verma-Lallian entered her father’s real-estate business not long after graduating from USC’s MBA program in 2007. About six years ago, she branched out on her own, amassing land and investment partners along the way. (Controversial “SPAC king” Chamath Palihapitiya is among them.) Last year, she reportedly sold a 2,100-acre site for $160 million, four times what she paid. AI data centers made sense given Arizona’s relative abundance of space far from large residential communities.
Verma-Lallian also has gravitated to AI in her professional life, using it to guide decisions on which properties to buy, judge the commercial potential of scripts and even translate Hollywood speak; she recently ran an email from an entertainment power broker through an AI model to learn that they were not saying what she thought they were saying. The backlot will feature an “AI studio” too, she says, though how a physical space will be optimized for technology meant to be used on computers remains unclear.
Hollywood is littered with investors who made their money elsewhere and rode into town with sacks of cash to sprinkle on lost-cause projects. Verma-Lallian says she’s aware of the stereotype and believes she can flout it by feeling at a soul level the appeal of telling the stories of the underrepresented as well as being a die-hard film fan herself. (She loves rom-coms.)
Verma-Lallian may be best known to Angelenos for buying Matthew Perry’s Pacific Palisades home a year ago. Skeptics might find the move macabre — Perry died at the home in October 2023 — but Verma-Lallian says she responded mainly to its panoramic views.
Verma-Lallian isn’t thinking small. If it comes off, the backlot will be among the biggest in the country, and she’s eyeing many more scripts even as production slows. “People [in Hollywood] say, ‘You’re doing well; why are you doing this to yourself?’ ” Verma-Lallian says. “But it’s a fascinating industry — something where you can actually change culture.”
This story appeared in the Oct. 15 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
