Professor “Omar Yaghi, who recently won a Nobel Prize in chemistry for his work developing metal-organic frameworks, is about to start manufacturing atmospheric water harvesters through his startup Atoco. The machines, expected to debut next year, will use metal-organic frameworks to pull moisture directly from the atmosphere at a rate of 1,000 liters per day,” reports The Doomslayer.
Bloomberg News earlier reported that
Yaghi won the 2025 Nobel Prize for a scientific breakthrough that his startup is now on the verge of commercializing. Its technology harvests water from the atmosphere in an increasingly arid world….Atoco, which will start taking orders for its water harvester in the second half of 2026, is targeting data centers as the artificial intelligence boom stresses water supplies across the US. The company is also focusing on supplying water to green hydrogen plants and communities in drought-afflicted regions of the world. The harvesters don’t require electricity and can produce ultrapure water using just ambient sunlight or waste heat from data centers and other industrial facilities.
Yaghi…pioneered the engineering of metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), which are extremely small structures made from metal and organic molecules and filled with porous cavities. A gram of MOF material can have the surface area of a soccer field. Atoco’s MOFs are made of elements designed to absorb specific molecules from the atmosphere, such as H2O or CO2….The commercial version [offered by Atoco] will be the size of a shipping container and generate 1,000 liters of water daily. (A typical data center consumes 2 million liters a day.)
A UN analysis claims that half the world experiences water scarcity, and that a quarter of the world’s inhabitants face extremely high levels of water stress.
It is not just arid places that face water shortages. Taiwan is lush and rainy — it receives 102 inches of rain per year, on average. But it is also densely populated, with about 1700 people per square mile. So it is denser than U.S. cities like Chattanooga, Montgomery, Mobile, and Oklahoma City. It is also very industrialized.
Because it is so dense and industrialized, Taiwan has barely enough water, despite how much rainfall it gets. So Taiwan is building a large-scale municipal desalination plant in Hsinchu City, at a cost of $545 million. This will enable it to manufacture more semiconductors, whose production process takes a lot of water.
Many counties with low rainfall are now turning seawater into drinking water using big desalination plants, such as Malta, Israel, and the United Arab Emirates. In addition, there are now floating desalination machines that use no electricity, which are “100% mechanically driven”: “Oneka’s floating desalination machines – buoys anchored to the seabed – use a membrane system that is solely powered by the movement of the waves. The buoys absorb energy from passing waves, and covert it into mechanical pumping forces that draw in seawater and push around a quarter of it through the desalination system. The fresh, drinking water is then pumped to land through pipelines, again only using the power provided by the waves.”
