Torus raises $500M Series C for containerized battery and AI compute units
A Salt Lake City energy-storage company said it closed a $500 million Series C led by Magnetar, according to a Bloomberg report carried by Investing.com. Iconiq Capital, Origin Ventures and Trinity Capital also took part, according to the company's statement to Bloomberg. The money will pay for manufacturing Foundry, a modular AI data center product that packs batteries and AI computing into shipping-container-sized units. Until now the company has mainly sold modular battery systems that help businesses and factories manage energy use and lower power bills.
Each Foundry unit is prefabricated at GigaOne, Torus's 545,000 square-foot plant in Salt Lake City, and combines power, storage, cooling, networking and compute. Units sit behind the meter and draw on spare capacity at existing transformers. Each one is paired with Torus Reserve, a flywheel-and-battery system that the company says can smooth bursty inference loads and provide backup during outages. Sizes run from 1 to 20 megawatts per site, and Torus says a unit can be installed within about four months.
The first customers are Hydra Host, an AI infrastructure company, and a second AI cloud provider that has not been named. Torus says Foundry already has thousands of GPUs deployed and plans more than 47,000 GPUs in Foundry units by the end of 2027. The GigaOne line is rated for 500 megawatts of IT load, with plans to expand to 1 gigawatt.
Why it matters
For founders, the round signals that investors will fund hardware that bundles energy storage with compute, not only chips or software. Torus is wagering that inference capacity is worth more when it sits where grid headroom already exists, which turns power availability into part of the product. Teams planning AI capacity may need to weigh siting and grid connection as heavily as hardware choice.
For operators selling into factories, the open question is whether buyers will pay for on-site AI capacity on top of the energy savings they already buy from battery systems. For investors, a $500 million Series C for a company that started with batteries shows how capital is moving into adjacent infrastructure categories. Pricing and deployment results will show whether the model holds beyond launch.
Key points
- 1Torus raised $500 million in a Series C round led by Magnetar, with Iconiq Capital, Origin Ventures and Trinity Capital participating.
- 2Foundry units are shipping-container-sized and range from 1 to 20 megawatts per site.
- 3Each Foundry unit is paired with Torus Reserve, a flywheel-and-battery storage system.
- 4Torus targets more than 47,000 GPUs deployed in Foundry units by the end of 2027.
- 5Foundry is built at GigaOne, a 545,000 square-foot Salt Lake City plant rated for 500 megawatts of IT load.
