Can data centres create drinking water?

Data centres of the future might just become a source of clean drinking water for your homes.

- Shweta Taneja

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 plugin 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.

They want to create sustainable water infrastructure to make high-quality decentralised water at scale and at accordable cost.

The magic of air becoming water

Converting 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).