Figure and Nscale sign partnership for up to 100,000 GPUs on NVIDIA Vera Rubin

Figure/Helix

Figure signed a deal with the AI cloud provider Nscale for up to 100,000 GPUs on NVIDIA's next-generation Vera Rubin platform, to train Helix, the AI model that controls its humanoid robots. The initial commitment is $3.5 billion of compute, which could grow past $6 billion, with first capacity in the second half of 2027. Nscale is also making a strategic investment in Figure, amount undisclosed.

• Compute will sit in a data centre in Barstow, Texas.
• Figure's bet is that robot skill scales like language models did: more data and more compute give a more capable model.
• Figure says its Index dataset of human behaviour is growing by about 35 minutes of new footage every second, which is what the GPUs will train on.
• This is a commitment, not delivered capacity: nothing comes online until the second half of 2027.