An industrial park in Irvine, California, may seem an odd spot to show off technology that wouldn’t be out of place in Dune, but that’s what’s happening on a sweltering September morning.

The temperature is already over 80 degrees Fahrenheit as the sun rises on a 20-foot-tall, metal-clad machine in the parking lot of Atoco, an Irvine, California-based startup. Engineers open panels to check systems and an iPad that shows a steadily ascending line that reveals the device’s purpose: harvesting water from thin air using special materials known as metal organic frameworks, or MOFs.

The materials won Omar Yaghi, the company’s founder, the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 2025, and Atoco has shown they work in prototypes capable of producing gallons of water per day. What’s unique about this iteration of Atoco’s technology is what it doesn’t require. No grid connection or even electricity is needed to grab water from the air at the microscopic level, nor is it required to in turn wring the water out of the materials in a form useful for humans.

Instead, all that’s needed is low-level industrial heat. That, Atoco says, makes them a perfect candidate to hook up with AI data centers, which throw off loads of waste heat as servers churn out everything from math proofs to virtual editors while also often requiring massive amounts of water.

“We were not really thinking of AI data centers,” four or five years ago, says Atoco CEO Samer Taha. But the massive buildout has created an opportunity for the startup that could allow it to get a step closer to its larger goal of ensuring people living in water-stressed regions have control over an increasingly precious resource.

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