Endeavour, the owner of data center firm Edged and cooling firm ThermalWorks, has partnered with desalination firm Trevi Systems to scale heat-driven desalination technology within the data center sector.

According to the firms, Endeavour will pair Trevi’s desalination technology with waste heat from Endeavour’s ThermalWorks closed-loop waterless cooling platform to turn data centers from a consumer to a producer of water.

The companies claim the systems can produce up to 200,000 gallons (750,000 liters) of clean water per day from brackish groundwater for every megawatt of computing power. They also claim that they can produce 50,000 gallons per day per MW from oilfield produced water.

Endeavour said that first deployments will occur at its data centers in the US market, with global expansion envisioned after. The company contends that at a 100MW campus, the system could produce up to 20 million gallons per day.

“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.”

A key aspect of Trevi’s system is eliminating concentrated brine, a major issue in desalination. Trevi claims that its system eliminates or drastically reduces brine discharge by using high-recovery Forward Osmosis paired with heat-driven concentration and crystallization, achieving up to 98 percent water recovery.

Trevi has yet to deploy its system at a data center site, but has completed several trials, including a solar-thermal water plant at the Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawaii that made drinking water from seawater with no grid power. Trevi was founded in 2010 and headquartered in Rohnert Park, California.

“Forward osmosis was always the right physics for brine. What it lacked was well-matched heat at scale, and Endeavour has that,” said John Webley, founder and CEO of Trevi Systems. “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.”

Endeavour was set up by Aligned founder Jakob Carnemark. Its Edged unit has data centers either operating or in development in Bilbao, Madrid, and Barcelona in Spain; Lisbon, Portugal; and across the US, including Missouri, Arizona, Texas, Georgia, Iowa, Ohio, and Illinois.

Water use has become a key issue within the data center sector, especially within the US market, which has seen more than 15 states weigh bans or moratoriums for new data centers this year, with water use cited as a key factor.

As a result, several major hyperscalers have moved to deploy closed-loop cooling systems. In addition, water reuse and recycling companies, such as Gradiant, have developed data center-specific systems to support more efficient water circularity and use.

Earlier this week, Texas-based water-harvesting company Aquaria Technologies announced that it was opening applications for a pilot of its Hydrogrid product, a modular system that provides data center operators with on-site water supply made directly from the air.