Figure signs a $3.5 billion compute deal with Nscale

Nscale and Figure signed a multi-year strategic partnership on 3 September 2026 under which Nscale commits $3.5 billion of compute to Figure, with a stated intent to scale past $6 billion. The commitment covers up to 100,000 NVIDIA GPUs on the Vera Rubin platform, with the first deployment in Barstow, Texas, targeted for the second half of 2027. Nscale is also making a strategic investment in Figure and becomes its preferred compute provider; Figure’s Helix model runs across the stack.

The number is the story, because of what it says about where the constraint now sits. Brett Adcock, Figure’s founder and chief executive, put it directly: to bring humanoid robots to every home, “we are largely constrained by data and compute.” Not actuators, not batteries, not hands.

Nscale’s chief executive Josh Payne framed physical intelligence as AI’s next frontier, and NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang said humanoid robots extend physical AI “into the world designed for people.”

None of this is a shipped robot. It is a bet, denominated in GPUs, that general-purpose machines which move through human spaces are a training problem — and that the training bill for one company now runs to billions before the first deployment lands.