London-based AI infrastructure firm Nscale has signed a multi-year agreement to supply at least $3.5 billion of AI cloud capacity to humanoid robotics company Figure, with room to scale past $6 billion. Nscale is also taking an undisclosed strategic equity stake in Figure and becoming its preferred compute provider.
Up to 100,000 NVIDIA GPUs, first systems in 2027
Up to 100,000 NVIDIA GPUs are earmarked for the partnership, with the first systems targeted for the second half of 2027 at Nscale's Barstow, Texas site. Nscale supplies compute and orchestration, NVIDIA supplies the underlying hardware, and Figure builds the models and robots on top.
"Our AI model, Helix, becomes more capable the same way every learned system does: with more data and compute," Figure founder and CEO Brett Adcock said. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang described the setup as a closed loop: training Figure's models on Vera Rubin through Nscale's cloud, validating in Isaac Sim, and deploying on NVIDIA GPUs inside Figure's robots.
Nscale is buying into its own customer
The arrangement mirrors NVIDIA's own playbook with AI labs it invests in, and draws similar scrutiny for its circular quality — an infrastructure provider taking equity in the customer buying its compute. Nscale is not short on capital: it closed a $2B Series C at a $14.6B valuation earlier this year, added a $900M revolving credit line, and closed roughly $3B of separate debt financing before this deal.
Figure needs compute more than cash
Figure closed a Series C exceeding $1 billion at a $39 billion valuation in September 2025, led by Parkway Venture Capital with NVIDIA, Intel Capital, Salesforce and Qualcomm Ventures. Its Index initiative is now processing 30 minutes of human training video every second, contributed by paid creators through a smartphone app. Turning that data into a robot that can actually work a shift requires the kind of sustained large-scale training runs Figure says it hasn't been able to do at pace — until this deal.
The humanoid capital race
Figure isn't alone in commanding this kind of capital. Skild AI raised $1.4 billion in January, Apptronik pushed its Series A extension past $935 million, and Physical Intelligence has been reported in talks for roughly $1 billion at an $11B valuation. Humanoid robotics startups have raised about $8.6 billion so far in 2026, already 1.8 times all of 2025. The open question is whether any of them can turn warehouse pilots and factory demos into robots that pay their own compute bills.
Reporting based on coverage from Tech Funding News, Figure and Nscale.