Endeavour and Trevi Systems have partnered to use data centre waste heat to produce clean water. The system could generate up to 200,000 gallons a day for each megawatt of computing capacity.
The arrangement combines Endeavour's ThermalWorks closed-loop cooling system with Trevi's heat-driven desalination and brine concentration process. Endeavour plans to install the technology first at its own US data centres before offering it more widely to hyperscalers and other operators.
The project targets a growing pressure point for the sector. Data centres require large amounts of electricity and, in many cases, substantial volumes of water for cooling, while many of the regions attracting new digital infrastructure also face water stress.
Under the model, heat from computing equipment would power Trevi's forward osmosis process. This can treat brackish groundwater and produce up to 200,000 gallons a day per megawatt, while treating oilfield produced water would yield about 50,000 gallons a day per megawatt.
A 100-megawatt campus could therefore produce as much as 20 million gallons of clean water a day. The system is designed to work with waterless cooling, allowing a site to avoid consuming water for cooling while also using waste heat for desalination.
Brine issue
The partnership also addresses one of desalination's most persistent environmental problems: disposal of concentrated brine. Conventional seawater desalination produces large quantities of salty waste, and zero-liquid-discharge systems have usually been limited by their electricity use and cost.
Trevi's process uses heat at 60C to 80C rather than high-pressure pumping. According to the companies, it draws water through a membrane using a specialised solution, then regenerates that solution with waste heat while concentrating the remaining brine towards solids.
Pairing Trevi's process with heat-driven crystallisers can cut purchased energy use by roughly 85 per cent compared with conventional brine concentration and crystallisation systems, the companies said. They argue this could make high-yield desalination and zero-discharge treatment more viable in areas with limited freshwater supplies.
Jakob Carnemark, founder and chief executive officer of Endeavour, said the scale of global brine discharge made the issue urgent.
"Desalination can help address water scarcity, but managing the resulting brine remains a major challenge," Carnemark said. "Every day the world pumps more than a hundred million cubic meters of brine back into the sea. Trevi's process runs on heat that is normally thrown away, and that changes the arithmetic. A network of data centers that make up to 200,000 gallons of clean water a day per megawatt could be the largest new source of fresh water on Earth. Our own data centers will be the first to prove it."
The wider context for the tie-up is a projected rise in power use from data centres as demand for artificial intelligence infrastructure grows. The companies cited International Energy Agency figures showing data centres used 415 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2024 and could use about 945 terawatt-hours by 2030.
In theory, waste heat from that future fleet could support water production on a scale equal to more than half of current global desalination output. The comparison remains theoretical, but it points to how operators are looking for ways to extract additional value from energy already consumed on site.
Field record
Trevi has already tested its process in several operating environments. It has run a solar-thermal water plant at the Natural Energy Labouratory of Hawaii, completed a two-year pilot with the Orange County Water District in California to concentrate reverse osmosis brine using waste heat, and deployed systems for oilfield produced water in California.
An additional project is due in Oman. Trevi holds more than 65 patents in 21 countries.
John Webley, founder and chief executive officer of Trevi Systems, said the missing ingredient for broader deployment had been a large, steady source of suitable heat.
"Forward osmosis was always the right physics for brine. What it lacked was well-matched heat at scale, and Endeavour has that," Webley said. "Gigawatt-scale manufacturing, projects that reject heat around the clock, and a supply chain that reaches every water-stressed basin on Earth. We have run this process on seawater in Hawaii, on reverse osmosis brine in California and on produced water in California and soon Oman. Now we can build these plants by the hundreds."