Figure said on 3 September it had committed $3.5 billion to buy cloud computing from Nscale, an infrastructure firm, to run up to 100,000 of Nvidia’s next Vera Rubin chips for training the Helix models behind its humanoid robots. The two said they intend to scale it past $6 billion. The hardware is meant to come online in the second half of 2027 at a site in Barstow, Texas. Nscale is also taking an equity stake in Figure as part of the deal.
Brett Adcock, who founded Figure, said the limit on putting humanoids into homes is data and compute rather than the machines themselves. Vera Rubin is a design Nvidia has announced but not yet shipped. Nscale is a young company, valued at $14.6 billion earlier this year with Nvidia among its backers, and it lost an OpenAI contract before signing a large one with Microsoft. Figure was last valued at $39 billion in a funding round in 2025.
Robotics companies have generally bought compute in ordinary amounts. A commitment on this scale, from a firm that has not sold a humanoid in volume, puts Figure alongside the frontier AI labs on spending, and folds a robot maker into the loop that already runs through the GPU market, where a chipmaker backs a customer that then commits to buying chips. Nvidia hardware sits on every side of this one.
Neither company has explained how Figure funds a commitment that begins in 2027, what Nscale’s stake costs or is worth, or what happens if Vera Rubin slips. Figure has not said how many robots the compute is meant to support, or by when. The spending is booked years ahead. The demand that would justify it is still an assertion.
