Can data centres produce drinking water?

DAta centres of the time to come mightiness simply suit a germ of clean drinking water for your homes. That’s the future that Uravu Labs, a Bangalore-based climate technology startup is working towards. In the last few years, they successfully built technology that converts air to drinking water, producing 5,000 litres of water a day. Now they are developing a plug-in module that they can embed into data centres to utilise waste heat and create more water, while cooling their servers.It’s an exciting time to be at Uravu Labs, situated in North Bengaluru, the new hotbed of deep tech’s manufacturing desires. A potholed road meanders through under construction high-rise buildings, vast empty tracts bought by land developers, manufacturing warehouses advertising 10kb of power, sparkling new sports academies, and mango farms – perhaps the only remnant of how this land was used a few years ago.The Uravu Lab’s plant is a massive factory-style setup in Kada Agrahara. Different era prototypes of air-to-water models stand alongside each other. Massive fans run throughout containers to move air through their absorbers, creating a constant whooshing and whirring sound along with a deep rumble of electricity-enabled machines. All these machines absorb normal air to produce distilled water, which is bottled into glass bottles and sold in the market under the brand name FromAir.At first glance, the plant looks more like a bottled-water business than a climate technology startup, but that’s just a survival-tactic, explains Swapnil Shrivastav, one of the four co-founder and CEO of Uravu Labs. “While we are still developing this sustainable technology and have higher costs, we decided to sell the 5,000 litres we’re producing every day and launched the bottled-water last year,” he says. Long term, the team is clear: They want to create sustainable water infrastructure to make high-quality decentralised water at scale and at accordable cost.The magic of air becoming waterConverting air to water is not a novel concept. Cultures across the world have been using passive methods to collect moisture from air – trapping water droplets from fog in high altitude areas (as Incas did in Peru) or collecting dew on leaves, or harvesting condensed water in underground baolis in the hot deserts of Rajasthan. “About 95% of the 200 startups working on water-from-air technology use condensation as their primary method,” says Shrivastav, bringing out a power point presentation in his computer to explain various ways that air can be turned into water – a technology that’s called atmospheric water generation (AWG).According to the UN, our natural air has six to seven times more water as all the world’s rivers. If we extract water from air, it is replenished within 8-9 days. It’s a massive potential for a planet which is fast coming under water stress thanks to climate change -- especially for a country like India, where about 50% of the population lacks access to safe drinking water.Engineering wise, condensation has been a solved problem for decades. Air conditioners use the condensation method to cool warm indoor air. Most startups who work in AWG today apply a condensation method: Cool air till it reaches Dew Point, where water vapour becomes liquid. But there’s a limit to this technology: it’s expensive, requires more energy and is unreliable as it depends on the weather.In 2019 when Uravu Labs started after winning a $50,000 grant from Water Abundance XPRIZE, a global prize to reimagine water production, they combined condensation with solar energy to make it sustainable and reduce energy costs. But by the pandemic, they realised that the technology wouldn’t be able to scale and was unreliable in its water supply – both an anathema to commercialisation. “The cost of this model won’t go lower than ₹8 per litre of water when we aimed at going to lower than ₹2 per litre,” says Shrivastav, adding that they needed to develop technology so it was easy to scale, cost efficient, reliable and cheaper to produce than ground or municipal water supplies.They moved from condensation to sorbents – using salts that absorb moisture. It was tougher to crack this technology – across the world only 4-5 companies use sorbents in AWG till date – but the team at Uravu Labs persevered. They started with solid, but quickly moved to liquid sorbents, or desiccants – as the industry calls salts that absorb moisture. “Solid desiccants needed re-engineering every time we needed to scale and needed more heat to generate water, keeping our costs up,” he said. Naturally available liquid desiccant lasted longer and made the tech easier to replicate. It was also more energy efficient.After raising a $300,000 pre-seed in 2021 from Speciale Invest, Uravu Labs began to develop more prototypes of liquid desiccant technology. From first generation to their latest – called Tattoine – they got their costs down to around ₹3-4 per litre. It still wasn’t enough.Water as a byproduct in data centresTatooine (named after the desert plant in the Outer Rim in the Star Wars universe) stands closest to the startup’s office, a sleek 30 feet container that’s tinier, more efficient that earlier versions.Alongside is a lab where they are creating new liquid desiccants – for different weathers from Delhi to Ladakh. Experimentation is not only limited to technology, the startup has also tried different business models to survive as their technology becomes more efficient.Five years ago, they built drinking water plants for hospitality, turned to CSR for a while to get sustainable grants, before resorting to selling bottled mineral water, tonic water, even developing beers under their brand FromAir.The bottled water business is a year away from profitability, but that’s not the end game for these four founders, who want to see the technology be used everywhere.That’s the reason Shrivastav is looking to collaborate with industries that produce heat as a by-product – as heat is the biggest cost for their setup. The first one that comes to mind is large-sized data centres – thanks to our insatiable need for AI. New hyperscale data centres house tens of thousands of servers. They’re being built by tech companies like Google, Microsoft and Amazon across the world. Each of these produces 30 to 100 megawatts of waste heat per day. That heat, if planned well, can be used by Uravu Labs to make its water production cheaper.To tap into this potential market and scale their technology, Uravu Labs has created a new prototype, an integrated sleek 20-feet container that will contain an absorber, desorber and can plug into a data centre, absorb all extra heat and turn it into drinking water, while cooling the servers. This is their next big product and something that will make them pivot from a bottled water company.“Data centres will benefit because they save up to 80% on cooling costs and also make water as a by-product which they can either use inhouse, or supply to a city,” says Shrivastav, adding that because they use a waste heat source to desorb water, water produced here could be potentially cheaper - as low as 30-40 paise per litre.Though fundraising is a constant challenge, in 2025 Uravu Labs raised their pre series A of $1.2 million from Enrission India Capital. With bottled business revenue and this money, they’re focused on streamlining the AWG technology for data centres over the next few years. The first pilot is underway with a US-based conglomerate, something they’re thrilled about.“It’s a collaboration with a hyperscaler and will be a game changer for us,” says an excited Shrivastav, adding that sometimes you pivot and survive while the world becomes ready for the disruptive technology you’ve built. Uravu Labs plans to do exactly that.(An author and columnist, Shweta Taneja tracks the evolving relationship between science, technology and modern society)