- Nscale is committing at least $3.5 billion in AI cloud compute to humanoid robotics company Figure, with room to scale past $6 billion.
- Nscale is also taking an undisclosed equity stake in Figure, becoming its preferred compute provider.
- Humanoid robotics startups have raised $8.6 billion so far in 2026, already 1.8 times all of 2025.
Training a robot to fold laundry, stack groceries or walk a factory floor for eight hours takes a strange amount of computing power: more, in some cases, than training a large language model.
That’s the vision behind Nscale‘s new deal withFigure, the humanoid robotics company chasing a $39 billion valuation: the London-based AI infrastructure firm has signed a multi-year agreement to supply at least $3.5 billion of AI cloud capacity to Figure, with room to grow past $6 billion.
Nscale is also making an undisclosed strategic investment in Figure, becoming a shareholder and its preferred compute provider. 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.
“Our AI model, Helix, becomes more capable the same way every learned system does: with more data and compute. Today we’re excited to partner with Nscale to bring the compute required to make this vision a reality,” said Brett Adcock, founder and CEO of Figure.
Nscale is buying into its own customer
Nscale will supply compute and orchestration, while NVIDIA will supply the underlying hardware, and Figure will build the models and robots on top of that.
It’s the same playbook NVIDIA itself has used with AI labs it invests in, and it’s drawing similar scrutiny: some on Wall Street have flagged these circular arrangements, where an infrastructure provider invests in the customer buying its compute, as a way to make demand look bigger than it is.
Nscale isn’t short on capital to make the bet. It closed a $2 billion Series C at a $14.6 billion valuation in March, and just weeks before this deal, closed roughly $3 billion in debt financing to build out GPU campuses in Texas and North Carolina. It’s also preparing for a potential US IPO, having told prospective investors it has secured roughly $51 billion in contracted revenue.
Figure needs compute more than it needs 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 among the backers. That followed a $675 million Series B in 2024, with Microsoft, NVIDIA, Amazon’s Industrial Innovation Fund and Jeff Bezos, through Bezos Expeditions, among the investors.
What Figure needs is compute, and it’s generating an unusual amount of raw material to justify it. Its recently launched Index initiative is now processing 30 minutes of human training video every second, contributed by paid creators through a smartphone app.
More data alone doesn’t solve the problem, though. Turning it into a robot that can actually work a shift requires the kind of sustained, large-scale training runs that Figure says it hasn’t had the infrastructure to do at pace — until now.
“We’re proud to be enabling the future of AI robotics together,” said Josh Payne, CEO and founder of Nscale.
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, whose chips sit underneath the whole arrangement, described it as a closed loop: “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.”
The rest of the field is raising just as fast
Figure isn’t alone in commanding this kind of capital. Skild AI raised $1.4 billion in January at a valuation above $14 billion, led by SoftBank with NVIDIA and Bezos also investing. Apptronik closed a $520 million Series A extension in February, pushing its round past $935 million. And Physical Intelligence was reported in March to be in talks for roughly $1 billion at a valuation above $11 billion, though that round hadn’t been confirmed as closed months later.
That’s part of a sector-wide surge: humanoid robotics startups have raised $8.6 billion so far in 2026, already 1.8 times the total raised across all of 2025.
The open question is whether any of these companies can turn warehouse pilots and factory demos into robots that pay their own compute bills, before investors start asking who’s actually buying the output rather than just funding the input.
