Brookfield Asset Management is in the process of launching an AI infrastructure strategy.Figure AI Inc./Supplied
Brookfield Asset Management Ltd. BAM-T is partnering with California-based company Figure AI Inc. to help train and develop humanoid robots, then put them to work in homes and commercial settings.
Figure is an artificial-intelligence robotics company that is working to build autonomous, humanlike robots that it hopes will have human-level intelligence and the skills to work on an assembly line or fold laundry.
Its partnership with Brookfield has several facets, and the Toronto-based asset manager invested in Figure’s latest funding round, which was announced Tuesday and raised more than US$1-billion, giving the private company a US$39-billion valuation.
Brookfield will help Figure develop what the AI robotics company claims will be the largest “real-world humanoid pretraining dataset‚” and build AI infrastructure to improve Helix, the model the company is developing to power its robots.
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The deal comes as Brookfield is in the process of launching an AI infrastructure strategy involving a separate fund starting this fall to make investments in the sector. Brookfield is seeing surging demand from tech companies for data centres, and is seeking to provide the real estate, infrastructure and renewable power to meet their needs.
“I believe we’re in the midst of this AI revolution that is going to happen, it’s going to change every single business in the world, it’s incredible what’s going to happen,” Brookfield chief executive officer Bruce Flatt said at a presentation to investors last week. “And we need to be at the forefront of it, and if we’re not, five years from now we’ll look back and we’ll be behind.”
Brookfield has plans to invest US$200-billion in what it calls “AI factories” in North America, Europe and Britain. Mr. Flatt said that is likely “just the beginning.”
“This is a multidecade opportunity that possibly is the largest business within our company within 10 years,” he said.
The partnership announced Wednesday gives Figure access to Brookfield’s real estate across residential, commercial and industrial buildings. Those spaces can be training sites to collect video and create data that will help teach the Helix model how to move and understand its environment.
“Figure has already launched data collection efforts in Brookfield environments and will continue to scale this program in the coming months,” the companies said in a news release.
As part of the partnership, Brookfield could also provide access to data centres with advanced computing chips, and will “explore opportunities to deploy humanoid robots within Brookfield’s portfolio over time.”
Brookfield’s head of global strategy, Stewart Upson, said the asset manager is interested in “enhancing our operations” by using the robots Figure plans to build.
Test cases at Brookfield could help Figure prove that its robots can operate in different commercial sectors. The ultimate goal is to build robots that are able to perform a wide range of tasks in the real world to improve productivity and efficiency, the companies said.
Figure’s founder and CEO, Brett Adcock, said in a news release that Brookfield brings “an unmatched platform to capture massive amounts of real-world, humanlike navigation and manipulation data across a variety of household environments necessary to unlock general-purpose humanoid robots.”
Mr. Flatt said in an interview earlier this year that shifting supply chains have pushed some forms of manufacturing back to the United States, citing the sophisticated chips used in AI as an example. But he said the prospect that automation could hugely reduce labour costs is a driving force behind that change.
Rapid advances in AI models have attracted hundreds of billions of dollars of investment in recent years, raising concerns that a data-centre bubble could be forming and that new technologies could create upheaval in the work force.
Sikander Rashid, who leads Brookfield’s new AI infrastructure strategy, said at last week’s investor presentation that it is worthwhile to consider the potential “casualties” among investors pouring money into the sector, drawing on lessons from the dot-com bubble and the build-out of fibre networks.
But he said vacancy rates in data centres are extremely low, and Brookfield has “not invested any capital on a speculative basis,” insisting on long contracts with strong counterparties.
“It’s land, it’s power, it’s data centres, it’s the chips – and, of course, the capital,” he said. “We want to bring it all together.”