Nvidia is in talks to invest an additional $1 billion in humanoid robot company Figure, extending a strategy that has shifted the chipmaker from financial investor to core technology supplier to the startup. Nvidia previously joined Figure’s Series C round and provides hardware support for training and deploying Figure’s Helix AI model. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has called the partnership a “robot flywheel”: models are trained on Nvidia’s Vera Rubin chips, validated on its Isaac Sim simulation platform and ultimately deployed on Nvidia GPUs inside the robots. The closed loop is accelerating Nvidia’s strategic push into physical AI.
Figure, the U.S. humanoid robot developer, has released Helix 2.5, its most advanced neural network model to date, and said it enabled zero-shot whole-body autonomy in 30 real homes. Figure called it the first demonstration at that scale of zero-shot whole-body behaviour generalisation for a humanoid robot. The company said a single pre-trained foundation model was applied to three types of behaviour: locomotion; manipulation of rigid and deformable objects; and bimanual coordination, as well as active perception. Figure said that, with task-specific data, architecture, training method and evaluation unchanged, pre-training on Index alone raised zero-shot recognition success to 56% from 9%. Index is Figure’s robot dataset project built for global scale. The model also validated a Human-to-Humanoid Robot Transfer Scaling...
Humanoid robotics company Figure has signed a multi-year strategic partnership with Nscale, a UK-based AI cloud infrastructure provider, to deploy up to 100,000 GPUs on the NVIDIA Vera Rubin platform. The initial compute commitment is valued at $3.5 billion, with both parties intending to scale the deal to over $6 billion. First deployment is targeted for the second half of 2027 at Nscale’s data center in Barstow, Texas. As part of the agreement, Nscale will also make a strategic equity investment in Figure and become its preferred compute provider. The two companies will explore using humanoid robots to expand Nscale’s own supply chain operations. Nscale, which counts NVIDIA as an investor following its participation in the firm’s Pre-Series C SAFE...
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