Endeavour and Trevi Target 200,000 Gallons of Water Per MW From Data Center Heat

Endeavour and Trevi Systems claim their combined heat-driven desalination system can produce up to 200,000 gallons (750,000 liters) of clean water per day for every megawatt of computing power. The two companies announced the partnership this week, aiming to convert data centers from water consumers into water producers.

Endeavour, owner of data center firm Edged and cooling firm ThermalWorks, will pair Trevi's desalination technology with waste heat from ThermalWorks' closed-loop waterless cooling platform. First deployments will take place at Endeavour's data centers in the US market, with global expansion planned afterward.

What are the claimed output figures?

The companies' numbers scale with site size:

• Brackish groundwater: up to 200,000 gallons per day per megawatt of computing power.
• Oilfield produced water: 50,000 gallons per day per MW.
• At a 100MW campus: up to 20 million gallons per day.

Trevi says its system eliminates or drastically reduces brine discharge, a persistent problem in desalination. It uses high-recovery forward osmosis combined with heat-driven concentration and crystallization, achieving up to 98 percent water recovery.

What did the executives say?

"Desalination can help address water scarcity, but managing the resulting brine remains a major challenge," said Jakob Carnemark, founder and CEO of Endeavour. "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."

John Webley, founder and CEO of Trevi Systems, pointed to the fit between the two companies' technologies. "Forward osmosis was always the right physics for brine. What it lacked was well-matched heat at scale, and Endeavour has that," he 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."

Has Trevi deployed at a data center yet?

No. Trevi has not yet installed its system at a data center site. The company has completed several trials, including a solar-thermal water plant at the Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawaii that produced drinking water from seawater without grid power. Trevi was founded in 2010 and is headquartered in Rohnert Park, California.

Why does the deal matter now?

Water use has become a central issue for the data center sector, particularly in the US. More than 15 states have weighed bans or moratoriums on new data centers this year, with water consumption cited as a key factor.

Several major hyperscalers have responded by deploying closed-loop cooling systems. Water reuse and recycling companies such as Gradiant have developed data center-specific systems to improve water circularity and use.

Earlier this week, Texas-based water-harvesting company Aquaria Technologies opened applications for a pilot of Hydrogrid, a modular system that gives operators on-site water supply harvested directly from the air.

Where does Endeavour operate?

Carnemark, who previously founded Aligned, set up Endeavour as its parent. The Edged unit runs or is developing data centers in Bilbao, Madrid, and Barcelona in Spain; Lisbon, Portugal; and across the US, including Missouri, Arizona, Texas, Georgia, Iowa, Ohio, and Illinois.

The claims remain unproven at data center scale, and the first US deployments will serve as the test. If the 200,000-gallon figure holds, data centers become net water suppliers rather than a burden on stressed basins.