The Hyatt Regency Dallas rolled out the welcome mat for Watter. [Photo: Watter]
Dallas-based AI infrastructure startup Watter just rolled out a waste-heat-to-water platform for commercial buildings. Its first customer: Hyatt Regency Dallas at Reunion Tower.
Watter’s hardware captures heat from computer servers inside a commercial building and converts it to hot water for the building. A server emits almost all of the energy it uses. Most servers operate at roughly 5% to 15% capacity but run in full-power mode.
The company’s consumer product, a high-tech residential water heater, captures waste heat from electronic devices to produce hot water, James Hancock, co-founder and CEO of Watter, told Dallas Innovates.
Hyatt Regency Dallas launch
Watter launched its commercial platform, anchored by AI computing hardware set up inside buildings, at the 28-story Hyatt hotel adjacent to Reunion Tower. The 50-story tower has been a skyline fixture since 1978.
Watter said the commercial system can offset water-heating costs while potentially generating revenue from hosting servers, much like a mini data center.
The Hyatt project demonstrates that AI computing “doesn’t have to live exclusively in massive purpose-built data centers,” the company said in a statement. “Hotels already have physical space, electrical capacity and significant hot water demand, creating an opportunity to put both the [computing power] and its waste heat to productive use.”
Hidden infrastructure
Watter, founded in 2024, said hotels like the 1,120-room Hyatt Regency Dallas are ideal candidates for its commercial model.
“When most people look at a hotel, they see a hospitality asset. We see infrastructure hiding in plain sight,” Hancock said in a statement. “We didn’t start by asking how to build a better data center. We started by asking what existing resources were being overlooked.”
A subsidiary of Dallas-based Hunt Realty owns Hyatt Regency Dallas and Reunion Tower. Watter is a spinout of Hunt Innovative Technologies, which sits under the Hunt Energy umbrella.
Hunter Hunt, chairman, president and CEO of Hunt Energy and Hunt Oil, said in a statement that the Hyatt’s newly installed Watter equipment lowers natural gas consumption while counterbalancing energy consumption by data centers.
The Watter technology represents a move away from “traditional data compute solutions and is a creative way of using waste heat from distributed [computing] to preheat water going into a boiler.”
What’s ahead
The Hyatt project is the first of three commercial installations planned by Watter. The company said it has a pipeline of more than 200 hotel properties across two ownership groups prepared to adopt the Watter system.
Watter has raised capital as it moves into the commercial market.
Last year, the company raised $5 million in seed funding from Hunt Innovative Technologies and 17Shoals, a Dallas-based investment vehicle for investor Tracey Maynor. The startup raised an undisclosed amount of money earlier this year, Hancock told Dallas Innovates.
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