Endeavour and Trevi Systems to First Deploy Heat-Driven Desalination at Endeavour’s US Data Centers, Targeting 200,000 Gallons per MW Daily

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

The pairing links Trevi's forward osmosis process with waste heat captured by Endeavour's ThermalWorks closed-loop, waterless cooling platform.

Data Center Desalination Targets Large-Scale Water Production

According to the announcement, the combination can turn a data center from a major water consumer into a direct water producer, generating up to 200,000 gallons, about 750,000 liters, of clean water per day per megawatt of computing capacity from brackish groundwater, or about 50,000 gallons per day per megawatt from oilfield-produced water.

The Technology Behind the Water Output

The data center industry typically measures water use in liters consumed per kilowatt-hour of computing, and 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. The platform also captures heat from the IT load at the temperature Trevi's process requires.

In Trevi's forward osmosis system, water is naturally drawn through a membrane by a specialized draw solution, avoiding the high pressure needed 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 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, the announcement stated.

First Deployments on Endeavour's Own Sites

Endeavour will initially deploy the technology at its own U.S. data centers. The company says its global supply chain and gigawatt-scale manufacturing capabilities will support wider deployment with hyperscalers and data center operators around the world.

Jakob Carnemark, founder and CEO of Endeavour, said the partnership changes the arithmetic of desalination because Trevi's process runs on heat that is normally thrown away. He described a network of data centers producing up to 200,000 gallons of clean water a day per megawatt as potentially the largest new source of fresh water on Earth, adding that Endeavour's 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 but had lacked well-matched heat at scale. He pointed to Endeavour's gigawatt-scale manufacturing, projects that reject heat around the clock, and a supply chain reaching every water-stressed basin on Earth.

Trevi has run the process on seawater in Hawaii, on reverse osmosis brine in California, and on produced water in California and soon Oman, and he said the companies can now build such plants by the hundreds.

The Brine Problem in Conventional Desalination

Desalination plants supply essential freshwater to water-scarce regions, but they also generate large volumes of concentrated brine. For every liter of freshwater produced, a typical seawater desalination plant returns about a liter and a half of salty brine to the sea.

Eliminating that brine entirely has historically been too energy-intensive and expensive for widespread use. Carnemark noted that the world pumps more than a hundred million cubic meters of brine back into the sea every day and that managing the resulting brine remains a major challenge for desalination as a tool against water scarcity.

Global Water Scarcity and the Environmental Toll of Brine

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 response has been desalination, but the brine it leaves behind now totals about 140 million cubic meters a day globally, 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 seabed, harm corals, and kill seagrass. Zero liquid discharge, which evaporates brine to solid salt, is described in the announcement 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 are projected to use about 945 terawatt-hours by 2030, according to the International Energy Agency.

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

Field-Proven Track Record

Trevi has demonstrated its process on the waters that matter, according to the announcement. Demonstrations include a solar-thermal water plant at the Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawaii that produced 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 that the two companies bring experience scaling next-generation technology, with both founders having scaled such technology before. Trevi Systems was founded in 2010 to commercialize its process.

The source material did not provide further detail on the founders' prior ventures beyond that founding date.