Atoco Unveils Atmospheric Water Harvesting On-Grid Prototype
During an exclusive visit at our headquarters in Orange County, California, our R&D Team demonstrated our on-grid atmospheric water harvesting prototype to Bloomberg.
A Startup Confronts Water Shortages by Pulling It Out of the Air.
As water risks are exposed by the Iran War and AI data centers, startup Atoco is preparing production of a device that can produce 4,000 liters daily.
The large metallic white box sits in a Southern California parking lot, looking unremarkable until water starts flowing from a hose attached to it. Peer inside, though, and it’s nearly empty but for some wires, tubes and a container of light-colored material.
The water isn’t being conjured out of thin air by magic but by MOFs — metallic organic frameworks. MOFs are nanocrystalline structures engineered at an atomic level to attract specific molecules. In this case that’s H2O and the machine made by startup Atoco is silently harvesting molecules from the surrounding air and storing them in the material’s porous cavities that serve as microscopic water tanks.
Atoco founder Omar Yaghi shared the 2025 Nobel Prize in chemistry for pioneering MOFs and on an April morning he gave Bloomberg News an exclusive demonstration of the commercial prototype of its atmospheric water harvester in the lot outside the company’s Orange County laboratory.
The original article has been published in Bloomberg on May 12th, 2026.