Nscale commits $3.5B in AI cloud capacity to humanoid robotics startup Figure

Training a humanoid robot to navigate the real world turns out to require an absurd amount of computing power. Nscale, the UK-based AI cloud and data center company, just agreed to supply at least $3.5 billion worth of that power to Figure, the robotics startup building general-purpose humanoids. The deal also includes an undisclosed strategic investment by Nscale into Figure itself, tying the two companies together in a way that goes beyond a simple vendor-customer relationship. The commitment could scale to more than $6 billion over time, covering the planned acquisition of up to 100,000 NVIDIA Vera Rubin GPUs. What the deal actually looks like The partnership centers on deploying massive GPU clusters at a facility in Barstow, Texas, with hardware installations expected to begin in the second half of 2027. Those Vera Rubin chips represent NVIDIA’s next-generation architecture, purpose-built for the kind of dense AI workloads that training embodied intelligence demands. Figure’s Helix AI model handles perception, reasoning, and motor control simultaneously. Two companies on a tear Figure, founded in 2022 by Brett Adcock, has raised more than $2 billion in total funding. Its Series...