The story behind RECOVER
We didn't change our science. We changed the problem it solves.
Nona began at MIT with a handheld seawater desalinator. Today the same MIT-patented process recovers the water AI data centers waste — at industrial scale.
See RECOVER
Same breakthrough, bigger problem
From the ocean to the data center
The science never changed. The problem we aimed it at did. Here's how Nona got from a handheld desalinator to recovering the water AI can't afford to lose.
The origin
Born at MIT
Nona spun out of MIT to make clean water possible anywhere — built on Ion Concentration Polarization (ICP), the electrochemical process invented in the lab of our co-founder and CTO, Jung Yoon.
The proof
A desalinator you could carry
Our first product turned seawater into drinking water at the touch of a button — no high-pressure pumps, no membranes to foul. If thermal distillation is a boiler and reverse osmosis is a filter, ICP is an electromagnet: it cleans water with an electric field instead of heat or pressure. The device proved ICP worked, and earned recognition from MIT and validation from the U.S. Army.
The shift
AI rewrote the water math
Then compute demand exploded. Every large data center cools with evaporative towers, and most of that water is dumped as mineral-heavy blowdown — millions of gallons per facility, per year. In 2025, $152B of data center projects were blocked or delayed, and water was the #1 reason.
Today
RECOVER
It was the same problem our desalinator already solved, at industrial scale. So we pointed ICP at it. RECOVER bolts onto existing cooling towers as a modular side-stream unit and continuously demineralizes the water so it never has to be dumped — reducing cooling water use by up to 50% and OpEx by up to 40%, with no change to how the tower runs. It's live today in a pilot with Tracy Renewable Energy.
Meet RECOVER
See how much water and money RECOVER can save you.
Model your water savings, OpEx reduction, and payback period for your exact cooling tower configuration — in minutes.