Form Energy raises $750 million to expand iron-air battery manufacturing

Form Energy has raised $750 million to expand manufacturing of its iron-air batteries, according to TechCrunch, a bet that the next phase of the grid buildout will require storage measured in days rather than hours. The company says the money will go toward increasing capacity in West Virginia, as US battery installations rise but remain dominated by short-duration systems. In the first three months of the year, the US installed 9.7 gigawatt-hours of energy storage, up 32% from 2025, TechCrunch reports.

The selling point is duration. Form’s chemistry is designed to deliver power for as long as 100 hours, using iron that rusts during discharge and is converted back during charging. That approach avoids the lithium, cobalt and nickel supply chains that have become a geopolitical and pricing bottleneck, and it also changes the kind of customer who can justify the hardware. Form says roughly 80% of its materials come from the US, with the remainder sourced from Europe and Asia, notably excluding China, in a market where Chinese companies dominate battery manufacturing.

The timing is being set by two parallel expansions: renewables that arrive in bursts, and electricity demand that no longer sits still. TechCrunch cites expectations that renewable generation will account for more than 90% of new US generating capacity this year, while electricity demand is rising “for the first time in decades,” with data centers a major driver. The article points to forecasts that data centers will quadruple their electricity use by 2035 and consume about 20% of US electricity generation by then—numbers that help explain why utilities and hyperscalers are shopping for storage that can bridge multi-day gaps.

Large buyers are already acting like long-duration storage is an infrastructure component rather than a pilot. TechCrunch says Google is building a new data center in Minnesota that will be partially powered by a 30-gigawatt-hour Form battery project, priced at about $1 billion. Crusoe announced in March that it would buy 12 gigawatt-hours of batteries from Form, and the company lists Xcel Energy and FuturEnergy Ireland among customers. Form also says it has a backlog of commercial projects worth about 80 gigawatt-hours of storage, four times larger than earlier this year.

The funding round, led by T. Rowe Price with a long list of institutional and strategic investors, adds capital to a sector where the hardest part is not the lab result but the factory ramp. Form’s pitch is that chemistry and sourcing can be aligned with policy goals at the same time: less exposure to China’s battery supply chain, and a product that lets grids run through renewable droughts without leaning as heavily on gas peakers.

For now, the most concrete datapoints are not the claims about a future grid—they are the purchase orders. A 100-hour battery is still a niche product, but it is already being priced and contracted like a prerequisite for new load.