The partnership, announced on 3 September 2026, centres on deploying NVIDIA's Vera Rubin GPU platform. Nscale's initial commitment stands at $3.5 billion of compute, with an expressed intent to exceed $6 billion. Up to 100,000 NVIDIA GPUs are in scope, with the first hardware targeted for deployment in Barstow, Texas, during the second half of 2027.
As part of the agreement, Nscale takes a strategic equity stake in Figure. The two companies describe the arrangement as vertically integrated: Nscale supplies the cloud platform, compute, and orchestration layer; NVIDIA hardware underpins training and inference; Figure's own model, Helix, runs end-to-end across the stack. The parties also said they intend to explore using Figure's humanoid robots to scale Nscale's own supply chain.
Josh Payne, CEO and founder of Nscale, said physical intelligence is becoming AI's next frontier. "We've seen incredible growth with inference and agentic AI and Figure is pushing the boundaries of AI even further. We're proud to be enabling the future of AI robotics together."
Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA, framed the deal in systems terms: "Humanoid robots extend physical AI into the world designed for people—opening a major new industry." He described the compute arrangement as activating a robotics flywheel, with training in Nscale's cloud, simulation in NVIDIA Isaac Sim, and deployment on NVIDIA GPUs inside the 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. This is the physical AI flywheel that will accelerate the path from models to robots in the world."
Figure founder and CEO Brett Adcock put the constraint plainly: "To bring humanoid robots to every home in the world, we are largely constrained by data and compute. 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."
Figure is headquartered in San Jose, California, and develops autonomous general-purpose humanoid robots. Nscale, based in London, operates data centres across Europe and the US, offering a full-stack AI cloud platform spanning hardware, power, and software infrastructure.
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