Runware Targets 30 Megawatts of Pods a Day by 2028, With $1 Billion in Interest and 20 Megawatts Claimed

Runware, an AI inference start-up led by co-founder and Chief Executive Flaviu Radulescu, said its Romania factory aims to reach 30 megawatts of data center capacity a day by 2028, nearly 1 gigawatt a month, TechCrunch reported on Oct. 30. The plan is a target. No factory output has been published.

The product is the Sonic Inference Pod, which Runware announced on Aug. 4. Every figure below about cost and speed comes from Runware, and neither source reports an independent measurement.

What one pod is

Runware's blog describes a pod as 1 megawatt of compute in a 20-foot shipping container, with a chiller of about the same size on top and roughly 1,200 GPUs inside. Nodes hold 2 to 8 GPUs. The main node uses the RTX PRO 6000, with B200 and B300 options and Vera Rubin planned. Cooling is closed-loop liquid and uses no water in normal operation.

Moving a pod takes a crane. Customers supply ground, power and network connectivity. Runware lists 160 locations in the US and Europe and plans up to 10,000 nodes online in the second half of 2026 and more than 1 gigawatt of inference compute in 2027.

The numbers Runware supplies

TechCrunch said Runware claims $1 billion in committed interest for the pods in the month since it began offering them to outside customers, representing more than 20 megawatts. That is about 20 pods, or $50 million a megawatt. Interest is not a signed order, and the article does not say how much is contracted.

Runware's blog puts facility and deployment cost at about $150 million a gigawatt, against about $15 billion for the traditional route, with GPUs excluded from both. It also says inference costs 30 percent to 80 percent less per GPU-hour than other providers, and 50 percent or more for most workloads. The page lists no public price.

Claim	Figure	Source
Factory output target	30 MW a day by 2028	TechCrunch
Interest claimed	$1 billion, over 20 MW	TechCrunch
Site pipeline	397 MW, expandable to 1.2 GW	TechCrunch
Facility cost	$150 million a GW vs $15 billion	Runware blog

All figures are company claims.

1. Sonic Pod route150 $M
2. Traditional route15K $M

Source: Runware blog, Aug. 4, 2026 (vendor-supplied; GPUs excluded)

Funding and the gap to a factory

Runware raised a $50 million Series A in December 2025 and more than $60 million in total, per TechCrunch. It plans a Series B and has not raised one. Its blog lists an oversubscribed pre-seed that closed in December 2023.

TechCrunch said Runware aims to bring pods online within 48 hours of arrival and to cut build time from three weeks to about one day as production ramps. A second factory, begun earlier in 2026, is due to finish within months and go online early next year, according to the article. The article cites Arrival, the EV start-up once valued above $13 billion, as the cautionary case for mass-producing new hardware.

Runware still depends on Nvidia for networking, and some parts come from Germany, per TechCrunch. Set against Upwind's $400 million Series C, Runware's $50 million Series A is one-eighth the cash for a plan that needs factories, and it is about seven times the $7 million seed Mintive raised.

The next check is the second factory's start date, which Runware puts in early 2027.