The deal
Figure and the British AI infrastructure company Nscale announced a strategic partnership on 3 September to deploy Nvidia’s Vera Rubin platform across up to 100,000 GPUs.
The initial commitment is $3.5bn of compute, and the two companies said they intend to scale the arrangement past $6bn. Deployment is targeted to begin in Barstow, Texas in the second half of 2027. Nscale is also making a strategic investment in Figure and becoming a shareholder.
“To bring humanoid robots to every home, we are largely constrained by data and compute,” said Brett Adcock, Figure’s founder and chief executive.
The number that does not add up on its own
Forbes noted the arithmetic: Figure has raised about $1.9bn in total and has now committed $3.5bn to a single compute contract.
That is only possible because the supplier is taking equity in the customer. Nscale’s investment turns part of the commitment into a bet on Figure’s future value rather than a straight receivable, which is the same structure showing up across the AI infrastructure market this year — vendors financing the demand they are booking.
It is a reasonable trade for both sides and a fragile one. If Figure’s models do not reach the capability its robots need, Nscale holds equity in the company that cannot pay, in a data centre built partly for it.
Why robotics needs this much compute
Humanoid robotics has an unusual data problem. Unlike language models, there is no web-scale corpus of embodied experience to pretrain on: the data has to be collected from robots operating in the world, or generated in simulation, and both are expensive in compute rather than in text.
Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s founder and chief executive, described the arrangement in those terms: “Nscale and Figure have activated the robotics flywheel: training Figure’s models on NVIDIA Vera Rubin through Nscale’s AI cloud.” Josh Payne, Nscale’s founder and chief executive, said the company has “seen incredible growth with inference and agentic AI and Figure is pushing boundaries.”
The companies also said they will explore using humanoid robots in Nscale’s own supply chain — a customer becoming a supplier to its supplier, which is either vertical integration or circularity depending on how the next two years go.
What to watch next
The second half of 2027 is a long way off, and nothing in this announcement is contractually irreversible in public. The checks are whether Barstow breaks ground on schedule, whether Vera Rubin systems are available at that volume when they are needed, and whether Figure raises against the commitment or renegotiates it.
