Nscale, Figure Ink $3.5B Deal for Up to 100,000 Vera Rubin GPUs

Figure announced on September 3, 2026, that it has signed a strategic partnership with AI infrastructure provider Nscale to deploy the NVIDIA Vera Rubin platform across up to 100,000 GPUs, with an initial compute commitment of $3.5 billion.

According to the Figure announcement, the deployment is targeted to begin in the second half of 2027 in Barstow, Texas. The deal carries an initial commitment of $3.5 billion of compute, and the companies stated an intent to scale the arrangement to over $6 billion. As part of the agreement, Nscale is also making a strategic investment in Figure, and the parties will explore the potential to scale Nscale’s supply chain with humanoid robots.

Deal Terms and Deployment

The partnership centers on the NVIDIA Vera Rubin platform, NVIDIA’s next-generation rack-scale AI system. Figure said the agreement secures access to reliable compute as it works to bring humanoid robots into homes. The initial GPU deployment is scheduled to start in the second half of 2027 at the Barstow, Texas site.

Nscale is an AI cloud infrastructure company. In a separate Nscale announcement about its Vera Rubin plans, the company said it would be among the first providers globally to deploy the platform and described delivering one of the largest and fastest rollouts of next-generation AI compute in Europe across sites in the UK, Norway, and beyond. The Figure partnership extends Nscale’s Vera Rubin deployment work to a US site supporting humanoid robotics training.

Why Figure Says It Needs the Compute

Figure said it is entering a phase where it is largely bound by the data and compute needed to train Helix, its AI model for humanoid robots. The company pointed to its recently announced Index effort, which it described as generating 35 minutes of training data every second. Figure stated that data alone cannot solve the problem and that scaling physical intelligence will require an immense amount of compute, framing the Nscale partnership as the compute runway needed to train the next generation of AI models for general robotics.

“Our AI model, Helix, becomes more capable the same way every learned system does: with more data and compute. Today we’re excited to partner with Nscale to bring the compute required to make this vision a reality,” said Brett Adcock, Founder and CEO of Figure.

Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA, said the two companies have activated what he called a robotics flywheel, in which Figure’s models are trained on NVIDIA Vera Rubin through Nscale’s AI cloud, validated in NVIDIA Isaac Sim, and deployed on NVIDIA GPUs in Figure’s robots.

Josh Payne, CEO and Founder of Nscale, said the company is excited to partner with Figure as physical intelligence becomes AI’s next frontier, adding that Nscale has seen growth in inference and agentic AI.

The Vera Rubin Platform

NVIDIA introduced the Rubin platform on January 5, 2026, describing it as six new chips designed to operate as one AI supercomputer. According to the NVIDIA announcement, the platform pairs the NVIDIA Vera CPU with the Rubin GPU and delivers up to a 10x reduction in inference token cost and a 4x reduction in the number of GPUs needed to train mixture-of-experts models compared with the Blackwell platform. NVIDIA said Rubin-based products will be available from partners in the second half of 2026, and named Nscale among the NVIDIA Cloud Partners expected to deploy Vera Rubin-based instances.

Figure’s Infrastructure and Funding Context

The Nscale agreement follows a series of Figure announcements about scaling data, manufacturing, and capital. In its Series C announcement on September 16, 2025, Figure said it had exceeded $1 billion in committed capital at a $39 billion post-money valuation, with NVIDIA among the investors, and identified building next-generation GPU infrastructure to accelerate training and simulation as one of three core areas for the funds.

In an April 2026 production update, Figure said its BotQ manufacturing facility had delivered over 350 of its third-generation Figure 03 humanoid robots and had increased its production rate from one robot per day to one per hour. The company said the larger fleet generates more data for Helix and supports commercial deployments.

Figure said the Nscale partnership secures access to the reliable compute it needs as it works to bring humanoid robots into every home, with initial Vera Rubin deployment targeted for the second half of 2027.