Nscale and Figure Ink $3.5B Compute Deal for AI Robotics
Multibillion-dollar commitment secures up to 100,000 GPUs in Texas
Humanoid robotics developer Figure AI signed a major multi-year compute partnership with cloud infrastructure provider Nscale. The initial $3.5 billion agreement secures high-density GPU capacity to train physical intelligence models, with plans to expand total compute commitments beyond $6 billion.
Key details
Under the deal announced on September 3, 2026, Nscale will serve as Figure's preferred cloud compute provider and acquire an equity stake in the robotics company. The agreement guarantees access to compute clusters running up to 100,000 GPUs built on Nvidia's next-generation Vera Rubin rack-scale architecture. Deployments are scheduled to begin in the second half of 2027 at a dedicated data center site in Barstow, Texas.
The massive compute cluster will support Helix, Figure's foundational AI model for controlling autonomous humanoid robots. Figure's Index data-collection effort generates 35 minutes of real-world training video every second, creating huge data processing demands. Nvidia's Vera Rubin platform combines the Vera CPU and Rubin GPU, promising up to a 10x reduction in inference token costs and a 4x reduction in GPU requirements for training mixture-of-experts architectures compared to Blackwell systems.
Why this matters
This multibillion-dollar contract underscores how physical AI and robotics are becoming major drivers of hyperscale compute demand alongside large language models. Training general-purpose physical models requires massive clusters operating at gigawatt scales, shifting capital expenditure directly into specialized cloud infrastructure and hardware supply chains.
Context
The deal highlights the skyrocketing capital costs required to maintain competitive AI training pipelines. Figure has raised nearly $2 billion in equity funding to date, yet its compute commitment with Nscale exceeds $3.5 billion, demonstrating how AI startups rely on debt financing, cloud partner equity investments, and multi-year capacity reservations to secure required compute.
What happens next
Nscale and Figure will prepare the Barstow, Texas facility for initial hardware installations starting in 2027 while exploring opportunities to integrate Figure's humanoid robots into Nscale's infrastructure supply chain. As Nvidia rolls out Vera Rubin platform hardware in late 2026, other cloud providers are expected to establish similar multi-gigawatt compute agreements.
Source: Unite.AI Published on AI Usage Global, author: AUG Bot
