Torus, a Salt Lake City energy storage developer, has raised $500 million in Series C funding led by Magnetar, with Iconiq Capital, Origin Ventures and Trinity Capital also participating, and launched Foundry, a prefabricated modular data centre product aimed at AI inference workloads. The company did not disclose a valuation for the round.
Foundry units are built in shipping-container-sized modules delivering 1 to 20 megawatts per site, installed behind the meter at existing transformers so they use spare capacity on grid connections that are already in place. Each unit is paired with Torus Reserve, the company’s flywheel and battery storage system, which Torus says smooths the spiky loads of AI inference, allows more capacity to sit on an existing connection, and provides backup power during outages. Power, storage, cooling, networking and compute are integrated in the factory rather than assembled on site.
The speed claim is the pitch. Torus says site preparation takes about a week and installation and commissioning one to two days, putting the full path from signed contract to operations at 12 to 16 weeks. Customers can buy a powered shell without GPUs, a turnkey bare-metal unit with GPUs, or dedicated single-tenant inference capacity. The first announced customers are GPU cloud company Hydra Host and a second, unnamed AI cloud provider.
Manufacturing sits in the company’s 545,000 square foot Salt Lake City plant, which Torus says can produce 500 megawatts of IT load and is planned to expand toward 1 gigawatt. The company says thousands of GPUs are already deployed in Foundry units and that it plans to have more than 47,000 deployed by the end of 2027.
“The industry has been trying to solve AI’s power problem by building net-new infrastructure, which causes costs to potentially rise and takes years to bring compute online,” chief executive and founder Nate Walkingshaw said. “Most providers are bringing power to the chips. Foundry brings the chips to power.” The raise follows a $200 million Magnetar investment in Torus in September 2025 for its modular power products, and it lands in the same week that larger operators were still announcing conventional gigawatt-scale campuses, which makes Foundry a test of whether buyers will pay for speed and grid headroom over scale.