Omen AI acquires Aquatic Labs for $16 million to boost real-time water sensor tech

U.S. data centers consume between 17 and 19 billion gallons of water annually to cool their chips, a figure expected to triple within the next five years according to The Water Foundation. This massive demand presents significant financial and political challenges for investors scaling artificial intelligence infrastructure. To address this, Omen AI is acquiring competitor Aquatic Labs in a $16 million cash-and-stock deal.

The acquisition follows a June Series A round where Omen raised a $31 million funding round to solve the problem of inefficient cooling fluid monitoring. Currently, operators must send samples away for multi-day laboratory testing; Omen aims to replace this with real-time sensors that detect valve failures or bacterial growth threatening water flow.

The deal was facilitated after Omen founder Zach Laberge met Aquatic Labs CEO Allan Adams through an investor in the filtration space. Both startups were developing complementary real-time water sensor technologies:

• Omen's sensors: Designed to identify specific elements within the water.
• Aquatic Labs' sensors: Capable of testing water alkalinity.

According to Adams, combining these two technologies creates a "much richer picture of the water and the fluid." The integration unites their vision of automating what has historically been a slow, manual process.

The combined entity brings together distinct founder backgrounds:

• Zach Laberge: Dropped out of high school to start his first company, which performed similar fluid analysis for large construction machinery relying on hydraulics.
• Allan Adams: An academic trained as a physicist who previously worked as an MIT professor and researcher at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute developing advanced ocean sensing technology before launching Aquatic Labs.

With Adams serving as chief science officer, the teams are currently integrating both technologies into a single sensor expected to launch by early next year. Omen plans to deploy initial sensors on chips consuming 250 to 300 MW of power by year-end, covering approximately $5 to $7 billion in hardware value. The company aims to install equivalent capacity for 1 GW of chips by the end of 2027.

The primary operational benefit lies in uptime; without monitoring, operators often dump water rather than risk equipment damage, forcing costly shutdowns until systems are restored. Real-time monitoring allows facilities to extend fluid usage and reduce cleanup expenses. Adams emphasized that safe disposal is critical since wastewater from data centers eventually enters municipal supplies: "water goes into data centers, and then it comes out and gets dumped into municipal water, and you want that whole process to happen in a way that's as safe and responsible as possible — and that means you got to measure stuff."

Despite investor skepticism regarding the AI infrastructure boom—with some estimating up to $4 trillion in spending by 2030)—Omen remains undeterred. Founder Laberge noted that their revenue comes from projects financed over a year ago, insulating them from current market sentiment shifts: "We're working customers on stuff they're building today or have already built, and so it doesn't really affect us because all of those projects were financed 12 months ago." He added that even if the market shrinks by half, their sector remains "the biggest market in human history."