Nobel laureate Omar Yaghi plans to turn UAE desert air into water

As a young boy in a refugee camp in Jordan, Omar Yaghi learned water scarcity the hard way.

- Waad Barakat

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 Prizewinning 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.