A 2025 Nobel Prize winner has set up a company to commercialize a machine that it claims can pull 1,000 liters (about 264 US Gal) of drinkable water a day from the thin air. As Interesting Engineering reports, Professor Omar Yaghi, a chemist at the University of California, Berkeley, invented a machine that works effectively in desert air with 20% humidity or lower. As a self-contained off-grid device, it has the potential to provide relief to regions scattered around the globe, where water shortages are persistent or have been precipitated by a natural disaster.
Yaghi’s company, Atoco, also sees a market in “personalized water,” much like where households generate their own off-grid power from wind or solar. Prototypes have been successfully tested in places as arid as Death Valley. The 1,000 liters a day machine is far bigger than the social media prototype machine image we see alongside the Professor in the desert, at around 20ft in length, or the size of a shipping container.
