Nscale signs $3.5B deal to power Figure’s humanoid robots

AI cloud infrastructure provider Nscale announced on Thursday a multi-year strategic partnership with humanoid robotics company Figure, committing an initial $3.5 billion in compute capacity with the intent to scale the arrangement to more than $6 billion. Nscale will also take an equity stake in Figure as part of the deal, becoming the robotics startup's preferred compute provider.nscale+1

Inside the Deal

The partnership centers on deploying Nvidia's ↗ 2.78% next-generation Vera Rubin GPU platform, with up to 100,000 GPUs in scope. The first hardware is targeted for deployment in the second half of 2027 at a facility in Barstow, Texas. Nscale's cloud infrastructure will power Figure's Helix AI models from training through deployment, supporting the company's push to develop autonomous general-purpose humanoid robots.comparethecloud+1

"To bring humanoid robots to every home in the world, we are largely constrained by data and compute," said Brett Adcock, founder and CEO of Figure. "Today we're excited to partner with Nscale to bring the compute required to make this vision a reality."nscale

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang framed the arrangement as a "robotics flywheel," with models trained on Vera Rubin chips through Nscale's cloud, validated in Nvidia's Isaac Sim simulation platform, and then deployed on Nvidia GPUs inside Figure's robots.comparethecloud+1

Nscale's Expanding Cloud Empire

The Figure deal comes just a week after Nscale, a London-based company founded in 2024, secured one of the largest cloud computing contracts of the year — a $45 billion, six-year agreement with Anthropic to supply compute from its Monarch data center campus in West Virginia. That deal, first reported by Bloomberg, will run on the same Vera Rubin chip architecture.reuters+1

"We've seen incredible growth with inference and agentic AI and Figure is pushing the boundaries of AI even further," said Josh Payne, Nscale's CEO and founder.nscale

The Physical AI Frontier

The two companies said they would also explore using Figure's humanoid robots to help scale Nscale's own supply chain, a move that underscores the circular logic of the partnership: AI compute builds better robots, and those robots may eventually help build the data centers that produce the compute. As Reuters reported, the deal reflects the growing appetite among robotics firms for vast amounts of cloud computing power to train increasingly complex AI models.reuters+2