Endeavour, Trevi claim 200,000 gallons a day per MW of computing

Endeavour and Trevi Systems said they will produce up to 200,000 gallons of clean water a day for every megawatt of computing, using waste heat from Endeavour's data centers.

The 200,000-gallon figure applies to brackish groundwater; Endeavour puts the campus-scale number at up to 20 million gallons a day for 100MW of computing. On oilfield produced water, the companies claim 50,000 gallons a day per megawatt. Trevi pairs high-recovery forward osmosis with heat-driven concentration and crystallization, which Trevi says eliminates or drastically reduces the brine desalination plants normally discharge and reaches up to 98% water recovery. Endeavour supplies the heat from ThermalWorks, its closed-loop waterless cooling platform. Data Center Dynamics first reported the partnership.

Allocators underwriting these campuses get a siting argument, not a revenue line: a cooling system that produces water rather than drawing it gives an operator something to put before a county board. Neither company put a capital cost on the retrofit.

Trevi has not run the system at a data center site; its trials include a solar-thermal plant at the Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawaii that made drinking water from seawater with no grid power. CEO John Webley says Trevi has handled reverse-osmosis brine in California and produced water in California, with Oman planned. Trevi was founded in 2010 and is headquartered in Rohnert Park, California.

Endeavour was set up by Jakob Carnemark, the founder of Aligned, and owns Edged, the data center developer.

Edged topped out 200MW of shell in Iowa with no tenant named, as this publication reported in September. Because the water figures are stated per megawatt of computing, they scale with leased IT load rather than shell capacity, which makes that lease-up a variable in the water arithmetic.

Bloomberg reported, and this publication covered, that Bain Capital was in talks to acquire Edged US from Koch Real Estate Investments in a deal that could value Edged at around $15 billion.

First deployments will be at Endeavour's data centers in the US, with global expansion envisioned after. Carnemark put the proof point on his own portfolio: "Our own data centers will be the first to prove it." The coverage names no site, commissioning date or water offtake contract.