Brett Adcock launches Harc AI lab: 50+ hires, a datacenter of Blackwells, and the ex-Apple iPhone designer building next-gen AI hardware
Mar 30, 2026 with Brett Adcock
Key Points
- Brett Adcock launches Harc, a new AI lab with 50+ employees focused on vision understanding and multimodal models for consumer electronics, running in parallel to his robotics company Figure.
- Figure and Harc share infrastructure including a full Blackwell B200 GPU datacenter split between them starting in April, with Figure's robots already using Harc's voice API.
- Adcock expects 2025 to be a significant commercial shipping year for Figure's humanoid robots, which already run complete 24/7 autonomous shifts with neural nets across the entire stack.
Summary
Brett Adcock is running two parallel bets on the future of AI hardware and robotics — Figure, his humanoid robot company, and Harc, a new AI lab he launched with a deliberately different mandate.
Harc has grown to over 50 people, with roughly two-thirds coming from top frontier labs. Adcock describes the talent market as the most competitive he has ever hired in, across robotics, AI, software, and hardware combined. The core research focus is vision understanding and models that can interact with the world and collect interaction data — areas Adcock believes are underexplored relative to the current generation of text-heavy frontier models. Computer-using agents that reason in pixel space, he notes, are only just emerging, with little precedent for how to build them well.
Why Harc sits outside Figure
Adcock separates the two companies by objective. Figure is narrowly focused on general-purpose humanoid robotics — predicting physics around grasping, touch, and movement. Harc is targeting next-generation consumer electronics and highly multimodal models designed to function as a Jarvis-style AI interface. The focus is different enough, in his view, to warrant separate organizations.
That said, the two companies already share infrastructure. Figure's robots currently use Harc's voice API. And in April, the two companies are together taking an entire data center of Blackwell B200 GPUs — Figure occupying half the building, Harc the other half, each paying separately.
Humanoid robotics timeline
Adcock pushes back on the idea that humanoid robots in the real world are two to four years away. Figure already has robots running complete 24/7 shifts fully autonomously, with neural nets all the way down the stack. He expects 2025 to be a significant commercial shipping year, with home-use cases — laundry, dishes, tidying — coming into focus alongside industrial deployments.
A White House appearance last week generated what Adcock calls unprecedented demand, despite showing no new capabilities. His read is that the world is only now waking up to humanoids, and the reaction confirmed the moment is here rather than approaching.