According to Water Foundation, American data centers consume 17 to 19 billion gallons of water each year to cool chips that operate at high temperatures, and this figure is expected to triple over the next five years.
For investors who have invested billions of dollars in expanding into AI, this is an expensive and politically challenging task. One way to reduce water usage is to better monitor the cooling liquid; however, currently, this process usually requires sending samples to a laboratory for testing, which takes several days.
Omen AI was established in 2024 with the aim of solving this issue. The company is developing a real-time sensor to determine whether valves are malfunctioning or whether the growth of bacteria in the system poses a threat to water flow. Following a $31 million Series A financing round completed in June of this year, Omen is now acquiring its competitor Aquatic Labs in a deal that involves $16 million in cash plus stock.
The completion of this transaction stemmed from the founder of Omen, Zach Laberge, being introduced to Aquatic Labs's Chief Executive Officer, Allan Adams, through an investor in the filtration industry. Both startups are developing real-time water sensors, and their technologies complement each other: Omen's sensors focus on elements in water, while Aquatic Labs's sensors test the alkalinity of water.
Adams told TechCrunch that integrating these two technologies into a single sensor can create a 'more comprehensive picture of water and fluids', and at the same time automate the previously slow and manual processes.
This merger also brought together two types of typical founders: Laberge dropped out of school to start a business, and his first company also focused on similar fluid analysis, serving large construction machinery that relies on hydraulic systems. Adams, on the other hand, comes from an academic background; trained as a physicist, he worked as a professor at MIT and a researcher at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute before founding his company, where he was involved in the development of advanced marine sensing technologies for a long time.
Today, Adams serves as the company's Chief Science Officer, and the merged team is working to integrate two technologies into a single sensor, which is expected to be launched on the market by the beginning of next year. Laberge told TechCrunch that the initial sensors will be capable of monitoring chips with a power of 250 to 300 megawatts by the end of this year, valued at approximately 5 to 7 billion US dollars; the company hopes to have an installation capacity equivalent to 1 gigawatt of chips by the end of 2027.
Its added value lies in the uptime: if a fluid system gets out of control, data center operators typically choose to empty the fluid rather than risk damaging expensive equipment. This means that operations must be suspended until the fluid system returns to normal, at a considerable cost. Monitoring systems, on the other hand, allow data center operators to use the same fluid for a longer period of time and minimize cleaning costs as much as possible.
Adams also hopes that this technology can have an impact outside of data centers. He told TechCrunch: "Water enters the data center, then flows out and is discharged into the municipal water supply system; you want the entire process to be as safe and responsible as possible – which means you must carry out measurements."
AI companies once estimated that by 2030, AI infrastructure spending could potentially reach up to $4 trillion. However, some investors have recently become more skeptical about this construction boom, leading to a significant decline in the stocks of hyperscale cloud service providers in recent days. Nevertheless, the Omen team is not worried about these changes in sentiment, as their work takes place after the data centers are already built.
Laberge said, "We are working with clients on projects that they are building today or have already completed. So, in fact, this will not affect us, as these projects were funded 12 months ago. Our view is that even if there is a tightening of conditions, it will still be the largest market in human history, even if it were to shrink by half."
