Figure has paid robot data contributors $15M and signed $3.5B in compute as data becomes robotics' bottleneck

thealexbanks · x · 2026-09-20

Alex Banks argues chatbots got smart on free internet text, but no equivalent exists for robotics — scaling laws now appear to hold in robotics too, making footage ownership the bottleneck.

Key facts:

Figure's data collection app Index has users in over 100 countries and had paid contributors $15M by late August.
Figure signed $3.5B of compute from London-based AI cloud company Nscale to train on that footage.
The quoted weekly report notes Figure's Helix 2.5 lifted robot task success from 9% to 56% across 30 unseen homes.

If scaling holds, the race shifts from models to who owns the in-home video data.

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Figure has paid robot data contributors $15M and signed $3.5B in compute as data becomes robotics' bottleneck

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