Orbis Electric was founded in 2014 to build high-efficiency motors and pumps for electric vehicles, marine systems, and aerospace applications. The company currently employs 21 people in about 14,000 square feet of space in Santa Rosa, California. Its data center cooling product, the Cooling Engine, was announced in November 2025. By 2028, founder Marcus Hays projects more than $500 million in annual revenue and a workforce approaching 300.
That is a steep trajectory for a company that did not exist in the cooling market a year ago. The bet rests on a single piece of technology: the HaloDrive, a rare-earth-free axial-flux motor-pump combination that Orbis claims delivers 96% efficiency. The Cooling Engine built around it supports rack densities exceeding 200 kW, occupies a mechanical footprint 50% smaller than conventional coolant distribution units, and, according to the company, can deliver up to $3 million in annual value per 20MW data hall.
Most high-performance electric motors use permanent magnets made from rare-earth elements, primarily neodymium and dysprosium. China controls roughly 60% of rare-earth mining and 90% of processing. For any manufacturer building infrastructure that the U.S. government considers strategically important, and AI data centers now fall firmly in that category, a rare-earth-free design eliminates a supply chain dependency that has become politically sensitive.
Whether the HaloDrive's axial-flux architecture can match the performance of rare-earth permanent magnet motors at the thermal loads that AI data centers generate remains to be demonstrated at scale. The 96% efficiency claim, if it holds in production environments, would be competitive with the best CDU pump systems currently on the market.
Hays told The Press Democrat that Orbis expects to need 40,000 to 45,000 square feet by 2027 as production ramps. The company plans to keep engineering in-house while shifting higher-volume assembly to contract manufacturers, a model that lets it scale output without absorbing the capital cost of building its own factory floor.
Sonoma County's manufacturing base gives Orbis a regional advantage. The area has roughly 23% more manufacturing jobs than the national average for similarly sized communities, meaning the skilled labor pool for precision electromechanical assembly already exists.
The competitive field is crowded. CoolIT Systems, Vertiv, LiquidStack, and Boyd (now owned by Eaton) all sell CDU-class products with established customer bases and manufacturing at scale. JLL forecasts nearly 100 gigawatts of new data center energy demand by 2030, which suggests the market is large enough for new entrants. But going from 21 employees to 300, and from zero data center revenue to $500 million, in roughly two years would be exceptional even in a market growing this fast. The gap between a compelling motor design and a shipping cooling platform with field-proven reliability is wide, and the companies on the other side of it got there over years, not months.