
Nscale is selling Figure $3.5bn of compute and buying a stake in it
THE SO WHAT
A compute vendor taking equity in Figure alongside a $3.5B, 100,000‑GPU deal is a bet that humanoid demand will be constrained more by access to training and inference capacity than by robot hardware. If you’re in physical AI, expect more structured compute-for-equity offers—your cap table is becoming part of your infra strategy.
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