Can AI data centers be mass-produced like cars? This startup aims to find out

AI infrastructure company Runware is making news again, just months after unveiling the Sonic Inference Pod, a modular data center built in a factory and shipped to customers ready to install. Now the company has bigger plans. It told TechCrunch it wants to build a factory that assembles these pods on a production line, as if they were cars.

The idea isn’t entirely new. Companies like Crusoe and Schneider Electric also sell prefabricated pods, but Runware says it can ship its pods faster. 

Flaviu Fadulescu, co-founder and CEO of Runware, told TechCrunch that the company plans to scale production at its Romania-based factory to 30 megawatts of data center capacity per day by 2028, or nearly 1 gigawatt per month. That’s a whole lot of capacity: at that pace, Runware would produce roughly as much in a year as the entire U.S. was expected to add in data center power this year, about 10 gigawatts. But it also reflects an industry-wide push to deploy data centers faster more efficiently. 

Nvidia announced, for example, the Vera Rubin AI factories and the DSX POD earlier this year. Both are also meant to make it faster and easier for companies to build their own AI data centers. The difference with Runware, though, is that it says it has actually built a factory rather than just designed the infrastructure that would let others build one. 

Fadulescu said Runware will gradually increase production starting next year and that it already has two factories — one it has used for a few years to build the pods, and a second it started building earlier this year. The second is expected to be finished within months and go online early next year. 

Next, Runware will bring its new factory online early next year, then expand to the U.S. and other regions worldwide. Modular systems are the future and will soon become “the standard for large AI deployment,” Fadulescu said.