The chemist is working on technology that can draw clean water straight from the air, even on the driest places on Earth — including the Gulf.
Atoco’s Founder, Nobel Laureate Prof. Omar Yaghi, featured in Khaleej Times
Atoco is featured in Khaleej Times this month, highlighting how Nobel laureate Prof. Omar Yaghi – Founder and Chief Science Officer of Atoco – aims to turn desert air into water by 2026, with commercial atmospheric-water-harvesting units capable of producing thousands of litres per day in the Gulf
As a young boy in a refugee camp in Jordan, Omar Yaghi learned water scarcity the hard way. The tap flowed once every week or two, and only for a few hours. When word spread that water was coming, he would rush anxiously to fill every container he could. Every drop mattered.
Now, the Nobel Prize-winning chemist is working on technology that can draw clean water straight from the air, even on the driest places on Earth — including the Gulf.
In an exclusive interview with Khaleej Times, Omar Yaghi, the 2025 Nobel Prize and Great Arab Minds Award winner, said the first commercial atmospheric water-harvesting solutions are planned for the second half of 2026, capable of producing thousands of litres of water per day.
“In 2020, I founded Atoco to carry this breakthrough from the molecular level to systems. After many years of research, we are now close to moving this technology from the lab to society,” said Omar, who is also the Chief Science Officer at Atoco.
The California-based startup has one mission, he explained: tackling water scarcity by developing sustainable solutions using reticular materials that his team has spent years designing and improving.
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