Nobel chemistry award boosts Irvine startup’s air-to-water technology for drought zones

Professor Omar Yaghi won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for a scientific breakthrough that his startup is now on the verge of commercializing. Its technology harvests water from the atmosphere in an increasingly arid world, with the global recognition set to give it a boost.

“He has always been highly regarded in the scientific community, but the Nobel Prize gives us additional validation in the business world and simplifies the communication of what we are doing,” said Samer Taha, chief executive officer of Atoco, the Irvine company Yaghi founded in 2020. Taha expects the Nobel to also spark interest among investors, though Atoco declined to comment on the company’s fundraising efforts.

Atoco, which will start taking orders for its water harvester in the second half of 2026, is targeting data centers as the artificial intelligence boom stresses water supplies across the U.S. The company is also focusing on supplying water to green hydrogen plants and communities in drought-afflicted regions of the world. The harvesters don’t require electricity and can produce ultrapure water using just ambient sunlight or waste heat from data centers and other industrial facilities.

Yaghi, a chemistry professor at UC Berkeley, pioneered the engineering of metal-organic frameworks, or MOFs, which are extremely small structures made from metal and organic molecules and filled with porous cavities. A gram of MOF material can have the surface area of a soccer field. Atoco’s MOFs are made of elements designed to adsorb specific molecules from the atmosphere, such as H2O or CO2.

Atoco plans to demonstrate a prototype capable of producing 53 gallons of water a day this quarter. The commercial version will be the size of a shipping container and can generate nearly 265 gallons of water daily. (A typical data center consumes nearly 530,000 gallons a day.)

Half the world’s population experiences water scarcity, and 25% endure extremely high levels of water stress, according to a United Nations analysis. Even in California, which boasts the world’s fourth-largest economy, nearly a million residents lack access to clean drinking water, a 2024 report found. Climate change-fueled heat waves and droughts, meanwhile, are exacerbating water shortages across the world and more intense and frequent storms can knock water treatment plants offline.

Yaghi, who serves as Atoco’s chief science officer, follows other Nobel laureates who became entrepreneurs before their research brought them worldwide fame.

When Frances Arnold received the 2018 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, she had co-founded two companies, sustainable fuels maker Gevo and Provivi, which develops ecologically beneficial pest control technology. Although she removed herself from fundraising after the award, Arnold said the Nobel raised Provivi’s profile on its efforts to reduce pesticide use.

“Provivi’s markets are in countries/regions that especially value the Nobel Prize (South America, Africa, Asia),” Arnold, a professor of chemical engineering at Caltech, said in an email. She noted that when she went to Mexico in 2020 to visit subsistence farmers, the country’s agriculture minister was happy to meet with her and has promoted the company’s technology.

The son of Palestinian refugees from Gaza, Yaghi was born in Jordan and immigrated to the U.S. to attend college. He credits public universities for his success and grants from the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy for funding the research that won the Nobel, which he shared with Susumu Kitagawa of Japan and Richard Robson of Australia.

“Federal grants played a major role in the initial discoveries that led to this amazing field,” Yaghi said at a news conference last week.

Woody writes for Bloomberg.