Torus Raises $500 Million to Put AI Chips Where Power Already Is

Torus, a Utah maker of grid batteries, raised $500 million and is moving into the business of selling AI computing capacity, betting that the fastest way around the power shortage is to put chips where spare electricity already sits.

The round was led by Magnetar, with ICONIQ, Origin Ventures, Ridgeline Partners and Trinity Capital participating, Torus said Wednesday. It didn’t disclose a valuation. The money will expand its 545,000-square-foot Salt Lake City factory and pay for deployments of its storage and computing products across the U.S.

Bringing chips to the power

The new product, called Foundry, packages power gear, cooling, networking and graphics processors into factory-built units that deliver 1 to 20 megawatts per site. The units are installed behind the meter at commercial and industrial sites, drawing on unused capacity at existing transformers rather than waiting years for new grid connections. Each one is paired with Torus Reserve, a flywheel-and-battery system that smooths the spiky demand of AI workloads and provides backup power. Torus says site preparation takes about a week and the full process from contract to running workloads takes 12 to 16 weeks.

The pitch is aimed at inference, the work of running AI models for users, which runs constantly and benefits from sitting closer to customers. Buyers can take an empty powered shell, a turnkey unit with chips, or dedicated single-tenant capacity. GPU cloud company Hydra Host and a second, unnamed AI cloud provider are the first customers.

Scaling the factory

Torus says thousands of GPUs are already running in Foundry units and it plans to have more than 47,000 deployed by the end of 2027. Its plant, which opened its first production line early this year and has added one roughly every three weeks since, can turn out 500 megawatts of IT load and is slated to reach 1 gigawatt. The company employs nearly 400 people.

Power has become the binding constraint on AI buildouts, and investors are paying for workarounds. Earlier this week Archrock agreed to pay up to $450 million for an off-grid power provider, and the financing behind Torus suggests lenders and growth investors see a similar opportunity in squeezing more out of the grid that already exists.