Water-from-air machine goes on sale in Ibiza at £150,000
UK climatetech firm Ahbstra says its ARK unit pulls up to 500 litres of drinking water a day out of the air. Its first buyers are off-grid property owners in the Balearics whose wells have stopped working.
Ahbstra, a UK climatetech company, has launched a machine that condenses drinking water out of the atmosphere and put a price on it: £150,000 per unit.
The machine is called the ARK. The company says it produces up to 500 litres a day at 30°C and 30 per cent relative humidity, and around 300 litres a day in conditions as harsh as 10 per cent humidity and 45°C.
For scale, Ahbstra puts average European tap water use at 144 litres per person per day. One machine is pitched at one household.
The first customers are largely in the Balearics. Chief executive Hashem Arouzi says he started the company after the wells on his own property in Ibiza ran dry.
On his account, more than 15,000 properties in Ibiza are not connected to a water supply and must source their own. Many now rely on tanker deliveries, and the reservoirs those tankers fill from are themselves depleted.
The regional backdrop is not disputed. Around 30 per cent of people across southern Europe face permanent water stress; in 2025, 36 per cent of people in Cyprus and 32 per cent in Greece reported difficulty accessing clean water, and several Greek islands declared states of emergency this year.
The technology rests on metal-organic frameworks, or MOFs — nanomaterials with enormous internal surface area, and the subject of the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Laboratories have shown they can capture water from dry air; building a machine that does it affordably has been the hard part.
Ahbstra's patented answer is what it calls a Suspended Particle Reactor, which cycles air through MOF granules held in a fluidised state. The company says this is the first commercially available MOF-powered water harvester operating at this scale.
Existing atmospheric water generators use cooling coils and work well only in hot, humid air. In dry conditions the coils must run colder, energy use per litre climbs and output falls away.
Running in a typical southern Mediterranean climate, the ARK draws around 10kW, which Ahbstra puts at 0.48 kWh per litre. The company says many customers are pairing it with solar.
Ahbstra has raised £7 million from family offices and strategic corporate distribution partners, and is working towards a Series A. Units are built in-house and production is being scaled up in Barcelona; the first purchased machines are due to be installed by early 2027.
Arouzi frames luxury villas as the early-adopter stage, with R&D aimed at lower power draw and smaller units for the wider residential market. He also points to mining and construction sites, disaster relief, datacentre waste heat and industries such as pharmaceuticals that already buy purified water.
For founders, the interesting number is not the 500 litres. It is the £150,000, paid by buyers for whom the alternative is a property that cannot demonstrate water security — a market defined by scarcity rather than by preference, and one where the first paying customers are subsidising the cost curve for everyone after them.