Data centers turn electricity into computation and, with more reliability, into heat. Two American companies, Endeavor and Trevi Systems, say that heat can be put to work making fresh water, up to 750,000 liters a day for every megawatt of computing capacity. The first pilot is planned at an Endeavor data center, which is where the claim will have to start behaving like a measurement.
The claimed numbers
Everything below comes from the companies' own statements, and none of it has been demonstrated yet.
- Output per megawatt: up to 750,000 liters of fresh water per day for each megawatt of computing capacity, using groundwater as the feed.
- Output per energy unit: up to 31 liters of clean water for every kilowatt-hour the computing infrastructure consumes.
- Regeneration temperature: 60 to 80 °C, supplied by heat from the server hardware.
- Brine handling: up to 85% lower energy use in the relevant processing stages compared with traditional concentrators and crystallizers.
The first two figures are at least consistent with each other. A megawatt running around the clock for 24 hours is 24,000 kilowatt-hours, and at 31 liters each that comes to roughly 744,000 liters, close enough to 750,000.
How forward osmosis does the work
The system is built on forward osmosis. Water crosses a special membrane because a solution on the other side pulls it through. Reverse osmosis, the better-known method, needs high pressure to force the water across. This process does not.
The solution then has to be restored before it can do the job again. That step is where the servers come in. The solution is regenerated at 60 to 80 °C using heat from the computing hardware, then sent back into the cycle.
In other words, the part of a data center that normally has to be dealt with becomes the energy source for the process. Few buildings get to charge their waste heat rent.
The brine problem
Desalination has an awkward leftover. Conventional plants discharge concentrated brine, and processing that brine further costs additional energy.
Trevi's system uses zero liquid discharge. The brine is brought down to solid salts, which cuts the volume of liquid waste. The companies say the energy needed in these stages could fall by 85% compared with traditional concentrating units and crystallizers. Note the "could". It is a projection, not a result.
Why the heat is available
The International Energy Agency estimates that data centers consumed 415 TWh of electricity in 2024. By 2030 that could grow to about 945 TWh, more than double. A large share of that energy ends up as heat.
If desalination can use the heat efficiently, a computing site could double as a water source. That is the pitch, and it is a tidy one. It also depends entirely on the process working at scale with the heat a real facility produces.
What remains unproven
The potential output figures are theoretical, and the technology still has to confirm its stated performance in practice. The pilot at the Endeavor data center is the first chance to do that.
The announcement, as reported, says nothing about when the pilot will start, what it will cost, or how much of a facility's heat the system can actually capture. Those are the details that decide whether 750,000 liters a day is an engineering target or a brochure line.
Until the pilot reports numbers, the claim holds water only in the figurative sense.