Figure AI

Robotics · AI Infrastructure

Partnership

Nscale strikes $3.5B compute deal, takes equity stake in Figure AI

Training a robot to fold laundry now demands more raw compute than training a language model, and someone has to bankroll that.

• Nscale, a London-based AI cloud provider, signed a multi-year deal to supply Figure with at least $3.5 billion in compute, with intent to scale past $6 billion, and will take an equity stake as Figure's preferred compute provider.
• Figure, founded in 2022, builds humanoid robots and its Helix vision-language-action model, and was valued at $39 billion after raising over $1 billion last year.
• The deal targets deployment of up to 100,000 NVIDIA Vera Rubin GPUs starting in the second half of 2027 at Nscale's Barstow, Texas site.
• Unlike language models trained on scraped internet text, Helix needs synchronized data of vision, instructions, and motor actions from teleoperation, simulation, or real-world robot trials, making training data far scarcer and more compute-intensive.
• Humanoid robotics startups have raised $8.6 billion so far in 2026, already 1.8 times the total raised across all of 2025.
• Nvidia is an investor in both Nscale and Figure, and some on Wall Street have flagged this circular structure—where a compute supplier also owns equity in its customer—as a way to make AI demand look larger than it is.
• The deal is the clearest sign yet that AI infrastructure providers view physical AI, not just chatbots and agents, as the next major source of sustained compute demand.