Torus Raises a $500M Series C Led by Magnetar

Torus said on November 11 that it raised $500 million led by Magnetar for Foundry, a prefabricated system that pairs battery storage with AI inference compute. Bloomberg reported the round as a Series C. The company did not give a valuation.

The numbers

• $500 million led by Magnetar. The company statement and Bloomberg both use that amount and that lead. Bloomberg calls it a Series C. The company calls it growth capital.
• Investors on the company statement: ICONIQ, Origin Ventures, Ridgeline Partners, and Trinity Capital. Investing.com and Quartz, both citing Bloomberg, name Iconiq Capital, Origin Ventures, and Trinity Capital.
• No valuation appears in the company statement or in Bloomberg's report. The company is in Salt Lake City.
• Foundry sites run from 1 to 20 megawatts. Torus says a site can go from contract to running workloads in 12 to 16 weeks. Nate Walkingshaw told Bloomberg the units can be installed within four months.

Where the money goes

Torus says the capital expands GigaOne, its Salt Lake City factory, and pays for Torus Reserve and Foundry deployments in the United States. The company says nearly 400 people design and build Foundry there. GigaOne is 545,000 square feet. Torus says the Foundry line can produce 500 megawatts of IT load, with plans to expand toward 1 gigawatt.

The first customers named are Hydra Host and a second AI cloud provider the company did not name. Bloomberg also names Hydra Host. Torus says thousands of GPUs are in Foundry units today, and it plans more than 47,000 by the end of 2027. Buyers can take a powered shell without GPUs, a turnkey unit with GPUs, or single-tenant capacity.

Most providers are bringing power to the chips. Foundry brings the chips to power.

Nate Walkingshaw, founder and CEO, in the November 11 company statement

Walkingshaw told Bloomberg the product is a distributed data center approach that moves the chips to power already on site. The company says each Foundry sits behind the meter, on spare capacity at an existing transformer, and is paired with Torus Reserve, its flywheel and battery system. The release says cooling is a closed loop and uses 95 percent less water than evaporative coolers. Those operating details are as Torus stated them.

What we are watching

The $500 million and the Magnetar lead are in both the company statement and Bloomberg. The Series C label is Bloomberg's. Ridgeline Partners is named in the company statement. Bloomberg's account, as Investing.com and Quartz carried it, stops at Iconiq, Origin Ventures, and Trinity Capital. There is no valuation. The timeline, the GPU plan, and the factory capacity are the company's figures.