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.
When Yaghi was a PhD student, he says, creating something like MOFs was “every chemist’s dream.” Part of his Nobel-winning work over the past 20 years has been taking theoretical research into the real world, creating a stable molecular structure that links organic material with metal ions.
The structure of a MOF looks somewhat “like a jungle gym on a playground,” says Seth Cohen, the dean of the School of Physical Sciences at UC Irvine. MOFs are essentially “molecular sponges—they’re a solid material that’s very, very good at absorbing other molecules,” says Cohen, who is not involved with Atoco. Like a sponge, the materials can also be wrung out using methods including heat to release whatever they’re holding onto.
These jungle-gym-like frameworks create open spaces on the microscopic level that can hold an unbelievable amount of material, and small tweaks can yield even more interior space.
“The footage of a gram of MOF could cover two football fields,” Yaghi explains. “They can store hydrogen in there to make clean energy, or you could store CO2 in there to make clean air. Or, in this case, you can store water.”
Atoco has developed what Taha calls “precision materials” with a specific objective of being able to harvest water, release it, and then do it over again and again. He quips that, as vice president of R&D Benjie Limketkai puts it, the material has to like water but not love it. To succeed commercially, it also has to use as little energy as possible.
“The scientists reach a level of precision [where] we really know even the angle of the atom,” in a given material, Taha says.
A tabletop experiment showing Atoco’s metal-organic frameworks on a scale as they harvest water in real-time.Photograph: Brian Kahn