“Professor Omar Yaghi won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry 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, with the global recognition set to give it a boost…

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, a chemistry professor at the University of California at Berkeley, 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 adsorb specific molecules from the atmosphere, such as H2O or CO2. 

Atoco plans to demonstrate a prototype capable of producing 200 liters (53 gallons) of water a day this quarter. The commercial version will be the size of a shipping container and can generate 1,000 liters of water daily.”

From Bloomberg.