Humanoid robotics startup Figure AI announced a strategic partnership with cloud provider Nscale on September 3, committing an initial $3.5 billion to deploy up to 100,000 Nvidia Vera Rubin GPUs, with plans to scale the deal beyond $6 billion. As part of the agreement, Nscale is also taking a strategic equity stake in Figure.
The GPUs will be housed at a 234-megawatt data center in Barstow, Texas — a facility originally built for cryptocurrency mining and now repurposed for AI infrastructure — with initial deployment targeted for the second half of 2027. Figure CEO Brett Adcock said the company's Helix AI model "becomes more capable the same way every learned system does: with more data and compute," pointing to Figure's Index initiative, which is generating 35 minutes of robot training data every second.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang called the move a step toward a "major new industry," as humanoid robots extend physical AI into environments built for people. The deal underscores how compute demand is shifting from language models toward physical AI systems that need massive real-world training data to operate safely alongside humans.