Don't let Sam Altman know about this, his data centers about to have some upgrades /s
this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2026
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Dewcatchers, dewcatchers everywhere...
Finally, I can achieve my dreams of becoming a moisture farmer.
Hope you enjoy a whiny nephew
I swear to god if that kid brings up the academy one more time, just kill me
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That water was in its way to somewhere, though. What is that other area gonna look like now that this device intercepts the water?
Sounds like that other area needs to pull up on those bootstraps and make a water machine for its needs then.
This comment is brought to you by the sigma water machine, buy yours today and lock your grindset on hydration!
(Hopefully obvious but /s)
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Atoco harnesses the power of AI to bridge the gap between scientific discovery and real-world implementation, transforming innovative research into scalable solutions. By integrating machine learning and AI with reticular chemistry, we dramatically reduce the time needed to develop, optimize and scale our novel nano-engineered reticular materials for carbon capture and atmospheric water harvesting.
Bruh.
You're conflating LLMs with Machine Learning and the broader industry of AI which have been solving real problems really well for a good long time.
This is likely not the Generative AI, LLM-slop type of AI you're thinking of.
I hate generative AI. But other forms of AI and machine learning have been used for much longer and haven't facilitated the building of ecologically harmful datacenters.
For example, AlphaFold, which is an AI program that can predict how proteins fold and is an incredibly useful tool.
I expect that the use of AI here would be similar: something trained for a specific purpose, not just generic generative AI tech like ChatGPT
I sure hope so, the website just reads like generic corporate slop
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This has been debunked before. To get 1000liter of water out of the air, the air needs to hold that much water.
This is a bit more serious than the old, frequently-debunked "dehumidifier in the desert" stuff, because it doesn't depend on cooling the air to get the water out, but using a molecular sponge. If you pump enough air over that, you'll eventually fill it up, and you can drive the water out by heating it up.
The guy behind this is a serious organic chemist, and his Nobel prize was actually for pioneering and developing these molecules, so it's not a case of "Nobel prize winner does daft stuff about a subject he's not an expert in", either.
I'm still reserving judgement on whether this will be economically sensible, but I'm not dismissing it immediately, either.
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I used to work for a company making a similar device, the chemistry behind the technology is actually a well researched topic, and there are many kinds of various chemistries that can achieve a similar effect. Silica gel packets are the most common, a cheap solution that extracts moisture from the air, but is non-reusable.
These MOF compounds are useful because they have a fundamentally different method of collecting the water molecules. The framework traps the molecules inside, which can be later released with heat. Thermal solar power is free, but does require careful management of the rest of the device such that the material can get hot enough (usually around 100c), which also providing another surface to condense the vapour. I spent alot of time designing and testing such panels. They do work! I can post pictures of fishtanks of water later.
There truly couldn't be much of a downside to these technologies. The real alternative is desalination, which produces hyper concentrated salt pools, or well water extraction, which is also bad...
The reason these technologies is usually due to the cost effectiveness to produce the material, and to build the enclosure around the material. The panels have to scale very large to get any reasonable about of solar power, plus the condensing and collecting mechanisms also add weight and cost. Water is not an expensive product, so at the end of the day, the economics don't always work out favourably.
Happy to answer any questions about the technology.
Here's a picture of one of our tests generating water from air! We got 21kg from a large-ish panel.
I can't show much else but I can guarantee we did harvest the water from the air.
At mass scale, could taking enough moisture out of the air affect local weather patterns?
Technically yes! To put it in perspective, there's about 2.5kg of water in the atmosphere per m^2 of earth surface area. If you put enough panels across the earth, you could probably do a decent job at taking some of the water out of the air.
We have to look at another factor affecting the water in the air. As we take water out of the air, it's not really a finite resource. Most water in the air generally comes from the sun evaporating the oceans. If we take the water out of the air, the sun will put the water back. There's always a balance of humidity and quantity evaporated. When the humidity is lower, the sun would have an easier time evaporating more water due to the osmosis of the water from the source (ocean) going into the air. Osmosis is a kind of log graph, so even if the humidity is lower, the exponential tail means the solar evaporation and humidity pretty much balances out at the end of the day.
It's similar thing to taking water from a river. If we take all the water from a river, can we dry up downstream? Yes! But considering the height of the atmosphere, it's like standing at the edge of the river trying with a bucket and trying to scoop everything up. Unless these water-from-air harvesters can reach all the way to the clouds, we probably won't dry anything up.
Not that I think your device has the same danger because water captured from the air will likely quickly be released again into the same air, but I think this is not a very good example of the safety of your device:
It’s similar thing to taking water from a river. If we take all the water from a river, can we dry up downstream? Yes!
We can and we do. The Colorado and the Yellow river no longer consistently reach the ocean.
The comparison I was trying to make is that we do have the power to capture 100% of a river. This isn't good, for obvious reasons. Humidity capture is a much different process, since we can't just capture 100% of the humidity from a panel either. You could have 80% humidity going in, but actually still 50% relative humidity going out. And that would be maximum absorbtion performance!
Thanks for your answer! I feel like that makes sense on a global scale, but mightn't local and regional scales be more impacted? We already know that the transpiration from forests affects rain patterns, and the forests don't need to be huge either.
Also, some ecosystems might be particularly vulnerable. For example, redwood trees actually absorb most of their water through their leaves from fog and mist. Could a local humidity harvesting plant potentially pull enough water from the air that the osmotic pressure is reduced below what redwoods need to absorb water? I suspect the answer is actually no for this particular examole, but my point is that powerful technologies like these must be thought through, especially if someone is claiming zero side effects. The time is long past for humanity to learn a little caution with potential climate changing technologies.
As for local or regional scales, yes there could be impacts. I'm not quite as well versed in how trees affect the environments, but I suspect a local water-from-air farm would have some impacts on a local scale. If we had some data on how redwood trees absorb based on the different environmental conditions, I could run some numbers to figure out the differences and see how it would be affected.
Agreed on the impacts though, this isn't a zero impact technology, but compared to the direct competitors it is trying to replace (groundwater harvesting or desalination), it is an improvement. A mindset I like to apply is that humanity will need water regardless of how they get it. New technologies should provide a solution that is lower impact, along with a financial incentive (cost).
easy, use the salt pool to create salt batteries, now youre several step away from creating an energy plant in the middle of nowhere!
Haha yes salt pools are fun, but wouldn't always be the right kinds of salts required to create batteries. Unfortunately real chemical processes require very high purity raw ingredients, and using the reject water from an desalination plant probably wouldn't cut it. Although if someone figured out how to make a battery out of that, that could have big potential! You'd get all the water and energy storage you would need.
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Oh no, the same scam again, when will people realize that putting dehumidifiers in the desert, where there is little to none humidity in the air does not produce significant quantities of water.
You can claim that your solution produces thousands of liters of water, but in practice its obvious that you cannot extract more water than what's already im the air, once you extract it, there is nothing left, it may work at first, but is not going to work continuously forever.
This is another example of a promised technology scam, pay me for the development and once it doesn't work, disappear with the money. People keep falling for it for some reason.
Well, unless he sells the patent to Nestle, it's COMMUNISM. Water is private property. /s
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