(Bloomberg) — Professor Omar Yaghi won the award for a scientific discovery that he is now about to commercialize. The company’s technology harvests water from the atmosphere in an increasingly arid world, and the global recognition should give the business a boost.
“He has always been well-respected in the scientific community, but the Nobel Prize gives us additional validation in the business world and simplifies communication about what we are doing,” said Samer Taha, CEO of Atoco, the Irvine, Calif., company founded by Yaghi in 2020. Taha expects the Nobel to also spark interest among investors, although Atoco declined to comment on its fundraising efforts.
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Atoco, which will begin taking orders for its water collector in the second half of 2026, is targeting . The company also focuses on providing water to green hydrogen plants and communities in drought-affected regions of the world. The collectors do not require electricity and can produce ultrapure water using only ambient sunlight or waste heat from data centers and other industrial facilities.
Yaghi, a professor of chemistry at the University of California at Berkeley, pioneered the engineering of metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), which are extremely small structures made of metal and organic molecules and filled with porous cavities. One gram of MOF material can have the surface area of a football field. Atoco’s MOFs are made from elements designed to adsorb specific molecules from the atmosphere, such as H2O or CO2.
Atoco plans to demonstrate a prototype capable of producing 200 liters (53 gallons) of water per day this quarter. The commercial version will be the size of a shipping container and will be able to generate 1,000 liters of water daily. (A typical data center consumes 2 million liters per day.)
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Half of the world’s population faces water shortages, and 25% endure extremely high levels of water stress, according to a United Nations analysis. Even in California, which has the world’s fourth-largest economy, nearly a million residents lack access to clean drinking water, a 2024 report found. Heat waves and droughts fueled by climate change are worsening the world’s water shortages, and more intense and frequent storms could knock out water treatment plants.
Yaghi, who serves as Atoco’s chief scientific officer, follows other Nobel laureates who became entrepreneurs before their research brought them global fame.
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When Frances Arnold was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2018, she had already co-founded two companies, sustainable fuel maker Gevo and Provivi, which develops environmentally friendly technology for pest control. Although he stepped away from fundraising after the award, Arnold said the Nobel raised Provivi’s profile in its efforts to reduce pesticide use.
“Provivi’s markets are in countries/regions that especially value the Nobel Prize (South America, Africa, Asia),” said Arnold, a professor of chemical engineering at the California Institute of Technology, in an email. She noted that when she went to Mexico in 2020 to visit subsistence farmers, the country’s agriculture minister was happy to welcome her and has been promoting the company’s technology.
The son of Palestinian refugees from Gaza, Yaghi was born in Jordan and immigrated to the US to attend college. He credits his success to public universities and grants from the National Science Foundation and the US Department of Energy, which funded the research that earned him the Nobel Prize, shared with Susumu Kitagawa of Japan and Richard Robson of Australia.
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“Federal grants played a key role in the initial discoveries that led to this incredible field,” Yaghi said at a news conference last week.
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