The AI buildout looks like the purest demand story in markets: the hyperscalers can’t buy chips fast enough. But look upstream, at the cap tables instead of the income statements, and the demand starts to look more circular. The companies selling the compute are also funding the companies that buy it. Nowhere is that clearer than in humanoid robotics.
The Figure cap table. Figure AI closed a more-than-$1B Series C at a $39B post-money valuation in September 2025, with NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Amazon all participating Reported · 0.8. Those are the three most consequential names in AI compute. And what do Figure’s robots run on? NVIDIA: Figure 02 performs all inference on dual onboard NVIDIA RTX GPUs and trains its models on NVIDIA H100s Reported · 0.9. So NVIDIA holds equity in Figure, and Figure’s hardware budget flows back to NVIDIA. The investor is the supplier.
Free — just sign up
Keep reading the full issue
Upstream is a free weekly letter — reading the full issue just takes a quick sign-up, no payment. Enter your email: if you already subscribe you're in instantly; if you're new we'll ask your firm, then you're straight in.
Read Upstream. Fathom the rest. Every fact sourced.
Built from the Tettares dataset (beta). Facts are at pending-review; rumored items are flagged and should be independently verified before action. Not investment advice.