Figure AI and Nscale have announced a strategic partnership providing Figure with access to up to 100,000 NVIDIA Vera Rubin platform GPUs, with initial deployment targeted for the second half of 2027 in Barstow, Texas. The deal represents an initial compute commitment of $3.5 billion with stated intent to scale beyond $6 billion. As part of the agreement, Nscale is making a strategic investment in Figure, and the parties will explore scaling Nscale’s supply chain operations using humanoid robots.
The partnership is directly tied to the compute requirements of Figure’s Helix AI model, which Figure CEO Brett Adcock described as the primary constraint on the company’s progress toward general robotics.
Why This Amount of Compute
Figure has entered what Adcock describes as a phase where progress is bound by data and compute rather than hardware or deployment. The company announced its Index dataset initiative last week, designed to build the most diverse humanoid training dataset ever assembled, currently generating 35 minutes of training data every second across Figure’s deployed robot fleet and data collection operations.
That data volume requires a proportional compute commitment to train against. Scaling physical intelligence – the capacity for a robot to generalize reliably across new tasks and environments – follows the same laws observed in language AI: more data and more compute produce more capable models, and the relationship has not yet plateaued.
“Our AI model, Helix, becomes more capable the same way every learned system does: with more data and compute,” said Adcock. “Today we’re excited to partner with Nscale to bring the compute required to make this vision a reality.”
The NVIDIA Physical AI Flywheel
NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang framed the deal in terms of the complete physical AI development loop. Figure’s Helix models are trained on NVIDIA Vera Rubin GPUs through Nscale’s AI cloud, validated in NVIDIA Isaac Sim before physical deployment, and run on NVIDIA GPUs inside Figure’s deployed robots.
“Nscale and Figure have activated the robotics flywheel: training Figure’s models on NVIDIA Vera Rubin through Nscale’s AI cloud, validating them in NVIDIA Isaac Sim, and deploying them on NVIDIA GPUs in Figure’s robots,” Huang said. “This is the physical AI flywheel that will accelerate the path from models to robots in the world.”
The Vera Rubin platform – NVIDIA’s next-generation AI compute architecture, featuring 27,500 GPUs in the Japan FRONTia national physical AI infrastructure announced in July – is the most capable training infrastructure NVIDIA has announced for physical AI workloads. Figure’s access to 100,000 Vera Rubin GPUs at scale represents a compute commitment comparable to what major language AI laboratories maintain for frontier model training.
Nscale’s Strategic Position
Nscale is positioning itself at the intersection of AI infrastructure and physical AI, having previously announced its Physical AI Living Lab for European robotics startups in partnership with NVIDIA. The Figure deal extends that positioning into a long-term commitment with one of the highest-profile humanoid robot companies globally, while the humanoid supply chain exploration creates a potential operational relationship beyond capital and compute.
“We’re excited to partner with Figure as physical intelligence becomes AI’s next frontier,” said Josh Payne, CEO and Founder of Nscale. “We’ve seen incredible growth with inference and agentic AI and Figure is pushing the boundaries of AI even further.”
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