To turn the tables, American technology innovation companies are positioning AI data centers as major water producers rather than water guzzlers.
The companies said data centers with new forward osmosis-based desalination plants can produce up to 200,000 gallons (about 750,000 liters) of clean water daily from brackish groundwater for each megawatt of computing capacity.
To make this a reality, two U.S.-based technology innovation companies, Endeavor and Trevi Systems, announced a partnership on Thursday to expand heat-powered desalination plants, with the first pilot deployment at Endeavor’s data center.
Waterless cooling system
They plan to use the heat generated by AI data centers to power a process that creates fresh water from brackish or produced water, reducing the need for additional electricity to run the process.
This technology works like a smart water purification machine, using heat instead of lots of additional electricity or fresh water. It uses a waterless, closed-loop cooling system, which means there is no need to constantly refill water.
The heat generated is used for Trevi forward osmosis, where water is drawn from a draft solution through a special membrane, similar to water being gently sucked through a filter.
Unlike reverse osmosis, very high pressure is not required. The drawing solution is then regenerated by heat at 60 to 80 °C so that it can be used again and again. This system removes salt and other contaminants and converts the brine into solids using almost all of the waste heat.
The system can produce up to 31 liters of clean water per 1 kWh of computing power, the company says. That means a 100-megawatt campus could also function like a 20-million-gallon-per-day waterworks, with the energy already coming from the computers next to it.
Convert brine into solids
Beyond the production of fresh water, the technology also helps avoid a major bottleneck in typical desalination plants. For every liter of fresh water produced, a typical seawater desalination plant sends about a liter and a half of salty brine back into the sea.
Treating this saline wastewater is expensive and energy intensive. Therefore, a large proportion of it is usually discarded because processing the brine in concentrators is too expensive.
Unlike traditional desalination plants, which consume nearly 16 to 26 kWh/m³ on their concentrators and 52 to 70 kWh/m³ on their crystallizers, Trevi’s system could reduce energy requirements by 85 percent.
This is made possible by the system’s Zero Liquid Distribution technology, which evaporates the brine into solid salt and reduces the handling of liquid waste.
“Every day the world pumps more than a hundred million cubic meters of brine back into the sea. The Trevi process runs on heat that would normally be thrown away, and that changes the equation,” said Jakob Carnemark, founder and CEO of Endeavor.
According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), data centers consumed 415 terawatt hours of electricity in 2024. This number is expected to more than double by 2030, rising to around 945 terawatt hours.
If the heat from this future data center fleet is captured and reused in this way, it could theoretically produce “more than half of the 130 million cubic meters of clean water per day currently produced by every desalination plant on Earth,” the statement said.
