Torus, a Salt Lake City-based energy storage and compute company, has raised $500 million in a Series C round led by Magnetar Capital, with participation from Iconiq Capital, Origin Ventures and Trinity Capital. The round, announced November 11, 2026, is 2.5 times the size of the $200 million Magnetar invested in Torus in September 2025, pushing the pair's combined backing of the company to roughly $700 million. Torus did not disclose a new valuation.
The money funds Foundry, a prefabricated, shipping-container-sized unit that bundles power, battery storage, cooling, networking and compute into a single package. Torus says a Foundry site can go from signed contract to running AI workloads in 12 to 16 weeks, versus the years typically required to build a traditional hyperscale data center campus, because no new building construction is needed. Units scale from 1 to 20 megawatts per site and are built in-house at Torus's GigaOne factory in Utah, where the company employs nearly 400 people. Hydra Host, an AI infrastructure provider, is among its named customers.
A bet on power, not chips, as the bottleneck
Torus was previously known as a battery manufacturer — GigaOne was recognized as Battery Manufacturer of the Year earlier this month — and is now repositioning that manufacturing base around a specific complaint from AI infrastructure buyers: there often isn't enough grid power to site a new data center, even when chips are available. By packaging storage and compute together, Torus is pitching Foundry as a way to stand up AI inference capacity on spare grid capacity rather than waiting years for new transmission or substation buildouts.
That positions Torus against a widening field of modular and alternative data center builders. Mavria, a Texas-based rival founded by former US Department of Energy staffers, raised $130 million just this week for a similar factory-built, truck-deployable modular data center product called Terrain. Larger players such as Crusoe Energy and Nscale are also chasing demand for AI compute that doesn't require new utility-scale power plants, while hyperscalers including Microsoft and Amazon are separately experimenting with modular and on-site generation to cut data center build times. Torus's edge, for now, is that it already manufactures the batteries at scale rather than sourcing them.
What to watch next
The near-term test is deployment speed at volume: Torus has promised 12-to-16-week turnarounds, and customers like Hydra Host will be the proof points. Whether Magnetar's repeated, escalating bets — $200 million last year, $500 million now — translate into signed megawatts on the ground, or whether rivals like Mavria match Torus's manufacturing scale, will shape how the modular data center race plays out over the next year. Torus has not disclosed additional financial details beyond the round size and lead investor.