Figure has signed a strategic partnership with Nscale for up to 100,000 GPUs on Nvidia’s Vera Rubin platform to train Helix, the AI model that drives its humanoid robots. The initial commitment is $3.5 billion, with stated intent to scale past $6 billion. First deployment is targeted for the second half of 2027 in Barstow, Texas.
Why a robot company needs a frontier-lab GPU budget
Figure’s argument is that humanoid intelligence is now a data-and-compute problem, not a hardware problem. The company says its Index dataset is generating 35 minutes of robot data every second from deployed machines, and that training on it at scale is the bottleneck. A 100,000-GPU cluster puts Figure’s compute in the same league as major AI labs.
Nscale is also making a strategic investment in Figure, and the two companies say they’ll explore putting Figure humanoids to work in Nscale’s own data-center supply chain — the kind of closed-loop deal that has become a pattern in physical AI.
“The physical AI flywheel that will accelerate the path from models to robots.”
Jensen Huang, Nvidia CEO, on the partnership
