Overview
- On Thursday Nscale announced a multi-year commitment to supply at least $3.5 billion in AI cloud and GPU capacity to Figure, with the agreement able to scale past $6 billion and making Nscale a shareholder and preferred compute provider.
- The companies plan to deploy up to 100,000 NVIDIA Vera Rubin GPUs, with initial hardware installations targeted to begin in the second half of 2027 at Nscale’s Barstow, Texas site.
- Figure says the capacity will power its Helix embodied-AI models that train on continuous, multi-modal sensor streams for real-time motor control, a workload the companies and analysts describe as often more compute-heavy than training large language models.
- The partnership includes reciprocal operational plans such as exploring the use of Figure’s humanoids in Nscale’s data center supply chain and a closed loop of training, simulation with NVIDIA Isaac Sim, and deployment on NVIDIA hardware.
- The deal highlights a wider 2026 surge in funding and infrastructure for humanoid robotics but also raises questions about the economics and governance of vendor-investor ties and whether commercial robot deployments can soon cover these large upfront compute costs.