Endeavour and Trevi Systems announced a strategic partnership on Oct. 22, 2026, to scale heat-driven desalination and brine concentration technology worldwide.

Paired with waste heat from Endeavour's ThermalWorks closed-loop waterless cooling platform, Trevi's technology can transform a data center from a major consumer of water into a direct water producer.

The systems can create up to 200,000 gallons (about 750,000 liters) of clean water per day from brackish groundwater for every megawatt of computing capacity, or about 50,000 gallons per day per megawatt from oilfield-produced water.

First Deployments at Endeavour's Own Data Centers

Endeavour will first deploy the technology at its U.S. data centers. The company says its global supply chain and gigawatt-scale manufacturing capabilities will support broader deployment with hyperscalers and data center operators worldwide.

According to the announcement, a 100-megawatt campus can generate billions of gallons of water every year using energy already paid for by the computing beside it.

The Brine Problem in Conventional Desalination

Desalination plants provide essential freshwater to water-scarce regions, but they also produce large volumes of concentrated brine.

For every liter of freshwater, a typical seawater desalination plant sends about a liter and a half of salty brine back to the sea. Eliminating the brine entirely has traditionally been too energy-intensive and expensive for widespread use.

Jakob Carnemark, founder and CEO of Endeavour, said, "Desalination can help address water scarcity, but managing the resulting brine remains a major challenge. 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, said, "Forward osmosis was always the right physics for brine. What it lacked was well-matched heat at scale, and Endeavour has that. 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 in Oman. Now we can build these plants by the hundreds."

How the Technology Works

The industry typically measures a data center's water use in liters consumed per kilowatt-hour of computing. A conventional evaporatively cooled facility runs at about 1.8 liters/kWh.

Endeavour's ThermalWorks group builds closed-loop, waterless cooling systems, meaning its data centers consume no water, and the platform captures the IT load's heat at the temperature Trevi's process needs.

In Trevi's forward osmosis system, water is naturally pulled through a membrane by a specialized draw solution, without the high pressure required for reverse osmosis. The draw solution is then regenerated with heat at 60 to 80 degrees Celsius.

The system removes salt and contaminants while concentrating the brine to solids, powered almost entirely by waste heat. The result is clean water production of up to 31 liters/kWh of computing. A 100-megawatt campus can become a 20-million-gallon-a-day water plant whose energy is already paid for by the computing beside it.

Global Water Scarcity and Desalination's Environmental Toll

According to the UN World Water Development Report 2026, one person in four, 2.1 billion people worldwide, still lacks safely managed drinking water.

The world's primary answer has been desalination, but the brine it leaves behind now totals about 140 million cubic meters a day worldwide, a volume expected to double by mid-century. Reverse osmosis brine is roughly twice as salty as the sea and often carries plant chemicals. It can sink to the bottom of the seabed, harm corals, and kill seagrass.

Zero liquid discharge, which evaporates brine to solid salt, is described as the known fix, but it has largely been priced out of municipal desalination because it typically runs on electricity. Conventional brine concentrators draw 16 to 26 kWh per cubic meter, and crystallizers use 52 to 70. Trevi's high-yield process pairs with heat-driven crystallizers that cut purchased energy by roughly 85 percent.

The Scale of Data Center Energy and Heat

Data centers used 415 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2024 and will use about 945 by 2030, according to the International Energy Agency.

Put to work this way, the heat from the 2030 fleet could theoretically make more than half the 130 million cubic meters per day of clean water currently produced by every desalination plant on Earth.

Field-Proven Technology

Trevi has run its process on the waters that matter, according to the announcement. That includes a solar-thermal water plant at the Natural Energy

Laboratory of Hawaii that made drinking water from seawater with no grid power, a two-year pilot with the Orange County Water District in California that concentrated reverse osmosis brine using waste heat, and oilfield-produced water systems in California and soon Oman. The company holds more than 65 patents in 21 countries.

The announcement also noted the two companies bring experience scaling next-generation technology, with both founders having scaled such technology before, though the source material did not provide further detail on their prior ventures beyond Trevi's founding in 2010 to commercialize its process.

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