Nscale Inks $3.5 Billion Deal With Robotics Firm Figure

Artificial intelligence cloud company Nscale has signed a major, multi-year agreement with humanoid robotics developer Figure.

This deal will see Nscale provide computing resources for Figure and commit at least $3.5 billion — and up to $6 billion — to power the development of Figure’s AI models and robots, Nscale announced Thursday (Sept. 3).

“We’re excited to partner with Figure as physical intelligence becomes AI’s next frontier,” Josh Payne, Nscale’s founder and CEO, said in a news release.

“We’ve seen incredible growth with inference and agentic AI and Figure is pushing the boundaries of AI even further. We’re proud to be enabling the future of AI robotics together.”

Under the terms of the deal, Nscale will become a shareholder in Figure and serve as its preferred compute provider, directly supporting the development of Figure’s next-generation Helix models and physical humanoid systems

The initial graphics processing units (GPUs) are scheduled for deployment beginning in the second half of next year in Barstow, Texas, the release added.

To meet Figure’s computational needs, Nscale intends to potentially deploy up to 100,000 Nvidia chips. Beyond raw processing power, the two companies also plan to explore opportunities to scale Nscale’s supply chain using Figure’s humanoid robots.

“Humanoid robots extend physical AI into the world designed for people — opening a major new industry,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia.

“Nscale and Figure have activated the robotics flywheel,” Huang said, as Figure’s models train on Nvidia through Nscale’s AI cloud, are validated in Nvidia and deployed in Figure’s robots. “This is the physical AI flywheel that will accelerate the path from models to robots in the world.”

The announcement follows a report from last week that Anthropic has agreed to pay $45 billion to rent cloud computing power from Nscale’s West Virginia data center.

The Nscale/Figure partnership comes as American businesses are increasing their spending on robots, which has been good news for the company building them.

As covered here last week, North American companies ordered 8,940 robots worth $622 million during the second quarter, respective increases over the same period in 2025 of 4.3% and 21.3%, per the Association for Advancing Automation.

“Order value is growing nearly five times faster than order volume, a sign that companies are not just buying more robots but paying more per robot and choosing more capable machines than they did a year ago,” that report said.