On September 3, humanoid robotics company Figure AI announced a multi-year deal with AI cloud provider Nscale covering an initial 3.5 billion dollars in compute capacity, with plans to expand beyond 6 billion. The infrastructure could eventually include up to 100,000 Nvidia Vera Rubin GPUs, with the first deployments targeted for the second half of 2027 in Barstow, Texas.
The math doesn't add up
Figure has raised roughly 1.9 billion in funding to date. The 3.5 billion commitment — nearly twice its total funding — is not an upfront payment but a long-term capacity contract. Still, the disparity reveals how much computing Figure believes it needs to build capable humanoid robots. Nscale is also taking an equity stake in Figure and becomes its preferred compute provider, which means Figure can't easily walk away or switch vendors.
Figure says the infrastructure will support future development of Helix, its AI system for controlling humanoid robots. The company stated that progress is increasingly constrained by the data and compute required to train Helix. To address the data gap, Figure launched Index, an app that pays people to film themselves doing chores. It now has 44,000 weekly active users uploading enough video to generate 30 minutes of data every second.
What it means
Nscale, which is preparing for an IPO, can now point to billions in contracted revenue despite minimal actual income. Nvidia, an investor in both companies, benefits as commitments drive GPU sales. Figure gets the compute it says it needs — but only by locking itself into a dependency on infrastructure it will never own. If Helix doesn't scale as hoped, or if the humanoid market moves slower than expected, Figure is still on the hook for billions to a landlord it can't evict.