Figure Signs $3.5B Compute Deal With Nscale — Still No Price on the Robot
Figure AI announced a multi-year deal with cloud provider Nscale for up to 100,000 Nvidia Vera Rubin GPUs, starting at $3.5 billion in committed compute with room to scale past $6 billion. Nscale is also taking a stake in Figure. First deployment is targeted for the second half of 2027, at a site in Barstow, California. Figure says the compute goes toward training Helix, its general-purpose robotics model, fed by “Index,” an internal data-collection project the company says generates 35 minutes of robot interaction footage every second.
None of that changes what a Figure 03 costs, because there still isn’t a number to change. Figure has never opened a store, configurator or price list for either Figure 02 or Figure 03. Every unit in the field — including the ones assembling parts on the line at BMW’s Spartanburg plant — is deployed through a partner or internal program, not sold. The $20,000 figure that circulates in press coverage is a target Figure has stated publicly, not a quote you can get today.
That gap is the story here. Figure is now committing more capital to compute than most humanoid makers have raised in total funding, while the robot itself remains further from a retail price than Unitree’s G1 or 1X’s NEO, both of which ship against a published number. A compute deal signals conviction about training data and model scale; it says nothing about unit economics, and Figure has not disclosed what a Figure 03 costs to build or what it charges partners per deployment. Enterprise buyers evaluating humanoids for factory work should treat “in production at BMW” and “for sale” as two different claims — only one of them is currently true for Figure.
Sources
Primary sources referenced in this article. Prices in the tables come from the live index and carry their own as-of dates.