Some quick research into the largest sources of fresh water in the world would likely point you to the aquifers sprawling for millions of miles underground, like the Great Artesian Basin in Australia, or the Ogallala Aquifer in the United States, or else to the glaciers and ice caps concentrated in Greenland and Antarctica, which are estimated to contain 70% of the world’s fresh water.
But there’s another large and reliable source of fresh water available: the atmosphere.
That’s according to Matt Jore, founder and CEO of AirJoule, a company that pulls water out of the air, then uses it to improve the efficiency of heating, ventilation, and air conditioning system. The technology is well-suited to evaporative cooling, which is lower-energy but — at least usually — requires more water than the alternatives; this is a key part of AirJoule’s pitch, especially to data centers.
“AirJoule addresses the water and energy nexus: you can’t make energy without water, and you can’t deliver and produce water without energy,” he told Latitude Media. “And if you can separate water from air, you generate dry or dehumidified air, which is extremely valuable for air conditioning systems, and you produce pure, PFAS-free, distilled water.”
Jore founded the company, formerly known as Montana Technologies, in 2020. In January 2024, AirJoule was created as the result of a 50-50 joint venture with the energy equipment and manufacturing giant GE Vernova, aimed at commercializing the technology. Just a few months later, in March of 2024, the company went public by merging with an existing SPAC.
How it works
AirJoule harvests water from air using rectangular, modular units, which leverage waste heat and an engineering sorbent material — called metal-organic framework — from industrial processes to capture water vapor from air, and then turn it into distilled water and dehumidified air.
Each unit has two chambers, equipped with doors. Hot, humid air comes into one of the chambers, where the sorbent material captures water vapor from it. Once the sorbent material is saturated, the door shuts close, and the chamber is put under a vacuum. Then, waste heat is used to heat the sorbent material up, which makes it release the water vapor into the chamber once again; there, it condenses into water at ambient temperature. The cycle occurs in both chambers, with one door opening alternating with one shutting, which allows the unit to also recover some of the internal heat generated.
The whole process requires less than 160 watt-hours of energy consumption per liter of water. Traditional air conditioning can use between 400 and 1,300 watt-hours of energy per liter of water.
“Conventional air conditioning systems condense the water outside the evaporator, and it just drips off into a drip pan,” Jore said. “It takes so much energy for a conventional carrier system to manage that water, that it’s almost a nuisance for them. But for us, our energetics are so low… that the value of the water we get is something like four times [the value of] the energy.”
The first demonstration units for data centers are planned for this year.
The potential for data centers
Technologies extracting water from air have a lot of potential for the booming data center industry. The facilities require vast amounts of water for onsite cooling and semiconductor manufacturing, among other things. According to a recent International Energy Agency report, in the U.S. a 100-megawatt hyperscale data center uses on average roughly 2 million liters of water per day; in five years, global data center water consumption could rise to around 1200 billion liters per year.
Added to a data center’s cooling system, AirJoule’s units can reduce the temperature of the waste heat they use from around 60 degrees Celsius to around 50 degrees Celsius, enhancing the cooling opportunity, according to Jore.
“But even more importantly, the dehumidified air that is an output of every AirJoule’s system can be combined with the distilled water to allow data centers to return to evaporative cooling,” he added. “If you can return a data center back to evaporative cooling, you’re reducing the energy required for cooling by as much as 75%.”
Evaporative cooling — which, as the name suggests, leverages water’s evaporation to cool down a data center — is attractive because it’s relatively inexpensive and energy efficient compared to other cooling systems, like traditional vapor compression chiller systems (low cost, but high energy use) or immersion cooling (low energy use, but high upfront costs). But its high water intensity in an already thirsty industry has led many data center operators to look for alternative solutions.
The units AirJoule is developing for data centers could harvest up to 3,000 liters of water per day. Since they’re modularized, the company plans to stack one on top of the other, so that a data center with 100 units could have a water production capacity of up to 300,000 liters per day, roughly 15% of the daily needs of an average 100-MW data center.
And in theory, an AirJoule system could be paired up with a data center’s air conditioning system and contribute to its water usage; this is something the company is actively discussing with the HVAC company Carrier, which is one of its investing partners.
Water harvesting technologies like AirJoule’s are also being incorporated into commercial AC systems and direct air capture. Avnos, for example, which uses a “hybrid” approach to DAC to pull out both carbon and water from the air, has turned data centers into its “new commercial axis,” hoping to appeal to hyperscalers’ need to balance fast development with climate commitments.
