Reuters and PR Newswire say London-based AI cloud firm Nscale just locked a multi-year partnership with humanoid robotics company Figure. The opening commitment is $3.5 billion of compute for Figure, with intent to scale past $6 billion. I’m treating that as contracted capacity, not a cash check — say it plainly.
From Mexico, this is the physical-AI story I’m watching tonight: not another chatbot raise, but a cloud shop buying into the customer that will burn the watts. Nscale becomes a Figure shareholder and preferred compute provider; the equity stake stays undisclosed. The stack is meant to power next-gen Helix models and the humanoids that run them.
Barstow watts, Helix models, humanoid floor
Per the company release and Reuters, the deal points at up to about 100,000 NVIDIA GPUs on the Vera Rubin platform, with first systems targeted for the second half of 2027 at Nscale’s Barstow, Texas site. That’s a long runway — I’m not calling it shipping robots next quarter.
Nscale CEO/founder Josh Payne framed it as physical intelligence as AI’s next frontier (PR Newswire). Figure founder/CEO Brett Adcock said Helix gets more capable the same way every learned system does — more data and compute — and that the partnership is meant to bring that compute. The same release says both sides will explore scaling Nscale’s supply chain with humanoids. Reuters notes Nscale competes with CoreWeave and Nebius on the AI-cloud side.
Why Figure needs the racks
Tech Funding News puts the deal in a hotter humanoid market: startups in the category have raised about $8.6 billion so far in 2026 — already roughly 1.8× all of 2025, per TFN. Same piece places Figure’s September 2025 Series C at more than $1 billion and a $39 billion valuation. I’m citing TFN for those context numbers; the core $3.5B / $6B commitment still rests on Reuters and the Nscale release.
TFN also flags the circular-capital vibe — infrastructure provider invests in the customer buying its compute — the same pattern Wall Street has grumbled about elsewhere. Fair question. Doesn’t erase the hardware timeline, but I’m not pretending the equity piece is a free lunch.
From Mexico, I’m watching the 2027 deploy
From Mexico, I care less about the press-kit flywheel and more about whether Barstow actually lights those racks and Helix gets the sustained training runs Adcock says it’s been missing. Multi-year, preferred provider, shareholder — that’s a tight knot. I’ll believe the category when the robots pay their own compute bills. Until then, Nscale’s $3.5B bet on Figure is one of the clearest physical-AI infrastructure checks this week. Sources: Reuters, PR Newswire, Tech Funding News.
Hero image: Wikimedia Foundation Servers by Victor Grigas on Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0). Cropped, graded, and lightly grained by Tech & AI Pulse.
