Figure has raised about $1.9 billion in its lifetime. On Thursday it committed $3.5 billion to rent computers. The humanoid robot company signed a partnership with Nscale for up to 100,000 GPUs on Nvidia’s Vera Rubin platform , to be deployed from the second half of 2027 in Barstow, Texas. The announcement states an intent to scale the arrangement past $6 billion. Nscale becomes Figure’s preferred compute provider and is taking an equity stake in Figure alongside the deal.

Brett Adcock, Figure’s founder, put the logic in one sentence: “Our AI model, Helix, becomes more capable the same way every learned system does: with more data and compute.” The entry ticket to the humanoid race is now a compute bill larger than the companies paying it.

A Bill Bigger Than The Balance Sheet

Figure’s funding history is short and steep. It raised $675 million in February 2024 at a $2.6 billion valuation. In September 2025 it raised more than $1 billion at $39 billion, from a roster that includes Nvidia, Microsoft, the OpenAI Startup Fund, Jeff Bezos, Brookfield and Intel Capital. Forbes put the lifetime total at $1.9 billion the day after the Nscale announcement.

The company had more than 350 Figure 03 robots deployed as of April. At BMW’s Spartanburg plant its earlier model supported production of more than 30,000 X3s over ten months , and the new one now handles logistics sequencing there. Two years of fundraising at rising prices have produced a few hundred robots working for customers.

The arithmetic works because compute contracts are paid as capacity is consumed, and this one starts in late 2027. Figure is promising a stream of payments over a term neither company has disclosed, and its landlord is buying a piece of the company to help fund the promise. The robot maker has, in effect, pre-committed its next several funding rounds to its GPU supplier, and the supplier has taken equity to make sure those rounds happen.

Three weeks ago Unitree, the world’s largest humanoid maker, listed in Shanghai at about $9 billion after bids for more than 8,000 times the shares on offer. It sells robots at gross margins near 60 percent, earned about $235 million of revenue last year , and made a profit doing it. Figure’s single compute commitment is worth nearly 40 percent of that entire company. Unitree’s IPO raised about $904 million. Figure has just agreed to spend roughly four times that on GPUs alone.

One American humanoid company’s rent for training compute is worth nearly forty percent of the world’s largest humanoid maker.

The comparison shows where the money in the category goes. Unitree’s business is building and selling machines at a margin. Figure’s spending says its business is training the model that runs the machine, and that business consumes capital at data-center scale before a single robot is sold at volume. The humanoid category is splitting into a hardware business with hardware margins and a compute business with lab-sized bills, and Figure’s commitment says which one it thinks the value sits in.

The Landlord Financing The Tenant

Nscale did not exist before 2024. It signed a $45 billion six-year deal with Anthropic two weeks ago for capacity in West Virginia, and it supplies Microsoft under contracts covering roughly 200,000 GB300 systems. It has told investors its contracted leases now total about $103 billion.

It is seeking $3.5 billion in pre-IPO financing ahead of a listing that could come this month. That package is $1.5 billion of convertible notes led by Third Point at a $30 billion valuation cap, plus about $2 billion from Nvidia. The company is raising money to build what it has already rented out.

The Barstow site is Ionic Digital’s Cedarvale campus, which Nscale leased in October 2025 for about $2 billion over ten years at 234 megawatts. So the chain runs as follows. Nvidia sells the Vera Rubin racks, invests in the landlord that buys them, and already holds a stake in the tenant that will rent them. That is how turbine makers have anchored power projects for decades, standing behind a builder and a buyer so a plant gets financed before it earns anything. Nvidia is putting its own money behind both sides of the contract so the capacity gets built.

Nscale is a two-year-old company whose ability to build is financed by the contracts it signs and an IPO it has not completed, and Figure has just become its third anchor tenant after Microsoft and Anthropic.

The AI bear case has rested for two years on the idea that a handful of hyperscalers cannot keep expanding capital spending forever. The buyers signing multi-billion-dollar compute contracts in the past two weeks include a quantitative trading firm, a frontier lab and, as of Thursday, a robot maker with a few hundred machines in the field. Each of them is demand for Vera Rubin racks in 2027 and 2028 that the hyperscaler capex numbers do not capture.

The risk is in the calendar and the chain. Vera Rubin systems are not broadly available until 2027, and Barstow has to be built out. Nscale has to complete its listing, and Figure has to keep raising money to pay rent that starts before its robots ship in volume. A slip anywhere in that sequence pushes the revenue into a later year for everyone above it.

Nscale’s prospectus, if it arrives this month, should list the Figure contract and its payment schedule beside the Anthropic and Microsoft leases. Figure’s next funding round will show whether investors will fund a rent bill nearly twice the size of the company’s lifetime capital. The deployment count, 350 robots in April, will show whether the compute is producing machines that customers pay for.

The humanoid business now has a rent bill, and it comes due in Texas before the robots ship in volume.