Nscale bets up to $6B of compute on Figure's humanoid robots
What's the deal? Nscale, a full-stack AI cloud platform, has signed a multi-year strategic partnership with humanoid robotics company FigureDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, committing an initial $3.5 billion of compute with the intent to scale beyond $6 billion. Nscale will also take a stake in Figure and become its preferred compute provider.
What's the endgame? The deal could deploy the NVIDIA Vera Rubin platform with up to 100,000 NVIDIA GPUs to power Figure's Helix models and its humanoid robots. Nscale provides the power, compute, and orchestration layer while integrating NVIDIA's infrastructure.
The initial GPUs are targeted for deployment starting the second half of 2027 in Barstow, Texas. The two companies will also explore scaling Nscale's supply chain with humanoids.
Why now? Figure frames compute as its main constraint. "To bring humanoid robots to every home in the world, we are largely constrained by data and compute," said founder and chief executive officer Brett Adcock. "Our AI model, Helix, becomes more capable the same way every learned system does: with more data and compute."
Who else is in? NVIDIA sits at the centre of the arrangement, supplying both the training platform and the chips deployed in Figure's robots. "Nscale and Figure have activated the robotics flywheel," said NVIDIA founder and chief executive officer Jensen Huang, describing a loop that trains models on Vera Rubin, validates them in NVIDIA Isaac Sim, and deploys them on GPUs inside the robots.
The signal: The tie-up marks a bet on physical AI as the sector's next frontier, extending the compute-intensive playbook of large language models into robotics. "We've seen incredible growth with inference and agentic AI and Figure is pushing the boundaries of AI even further," said Nscale chief executive officer and founder Josh Payne. For Nscale, becoming both shareholder and supplier ties its growth directly to Figure's ability to ship humanoids at scale.
Read more: nscale.com
Image credit: Generated with Gemini
