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Nscale commits US $ 3.5 billion in AI compute to power Figure humanoid robots
Nscale has committed US $ 3.5 billion of AI compute to humanoid robotics company Figure under a multi-year partnership that could scale beyond US $ 6 billion and deploy up to 100,000 NVIDIA GPUs.
The agreement will make Nscale Figure’ s preferred compute provider, supporting development of its Helix AI models and humanoid robots. Initial GPUs are targeted for deployment from the second half of 2027 at Nscale infrastructure in Barstow, Texas.
The companies said the potential deployment would use NVIDIA’ s Vera Rubin platform, providing the computing capacity required to train increasingly sophisticated Physical AI systems. Nscale will also become a Figure shareholder through a strategic investment.
The partnership combines Nscale’ s power, compute platform and orchestration capabilities with NVIDIA AI infrastructure. Figure expects the additional capacity to accelerate training and deployment of Helix, its AI model designed to enable humanoid robots to understand and interact with physical environments.
Josh Payne, CEO and founder, Nscale, said physical intelligence represented AI’ s“ next frontier”, following rapid growth in inference and Agentic AI.
Jensen Huang, founder and CEO, NVIDIA, said the collaboration created a“ physical AI flywheel”, spanning model training on Vera Rubin, validation through NVIDIA Isaac Sim and deployment on NVIDIA GPUs inside Figure robots.
Figure founder and CEO Brett Adcock said data and compute remained key constraints on the company’ s ambition to bring humanoid robots into homes.
The partners will also explore using Figure humanoids within Nscale’ s supply chain, potentially creating another practical deployment environment for the technology as operations expand across global technology markets.
Cipher Digital targets 2.5 GW of dedicated power for HPC data centre expansion
Cipher Digital has begun developing lateral natural gas pipelines designed to unlock up to 2.5 GW of new on-site power generation for high-performance computing data centres across multiple US sites.
developers on securing dedicated power sources as large AI workloads place greater pressure on utility grids. Cipher believes the proximity of its sites to significant natural gas resources could provide an advantage as it expands its leasing portfolio.
The infrastructure will connect Cipher facilities with nearby natural gas supplies, supporting a bring-your-own-generation strategy intended to accelerate access to electricity as AI and HPC operators compete for increasingly constrained grid capacity.
Cipher said it would work with power providers to develop and operate generation infrastructure connected to the pipelines. The company expects the projects to make additional power available before the end of 2027, potentially expanding the amount of industrial-scale data centre capacity it can lease to HPC tenants.
The move reflects a growing focus among data centre
Tyler Page, CEO, Cipher Digital, said:“ Securing and delivering power is the foundation of everything we do and bringing our own electricity generation allows us to unlock significant new capacity quickly.”
Page said development of the lateral pipelines represented a decisive step towards adding up to 2.5 GW of power to Cipher’ s portfolio.
Cipher also plans to seek grid connections for the generation capacity. The company said this could enable the projects to contribute to grid stability in communities where it develops data centres while supporting further HPC infrastructure expansion over time. www. intelligentcio. com
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