Humanoid robotics company Figure has locked in one of the biggest compute commitments in the sector. AI cloud provider Nscale is committing at least $3.5B in cloud compute to Figure, with room to scale past $6B, and is taking an undisclosed equity stake in the robot maker as its preferred compute provider.
The deal forms what Nscale describes as a closed loop: training Figure’s models on Nvidia Vera Rubin hardware through Nscale’s AI cloud, validating them in Nvidia’s Isaac Sim simulation environment, then deploying them on Nvidia GPUs inside Figure’s robots. It effectively gives Figure a dedicated AI factory floor for the massive training runs humanoid robots demand.
The arrangement reflects how capital is flooding into embodied AI. Humanoid robotics startups have raised $8.6B so far in 2026, already 1.8 times the total raised across all of 2025, according to TFN. Skild AI raised $1.4B in January at a valuation above $14B with SoftBank, Nvidia and Bezos participating, while Apptronik closed a $520M Series A extension in February.
The open question for Figure and its peers is whether warehouse pilots and factory demos can turn into robots that pay their own compute bills, before investors start asking who is actually buying the output rather than funding the input.
