By Oke Peter
NEW YORK – XPRIZE, the world’s leader in designing and operating large-scale incentive competitions to solve humanity’s grand challenges,
today announced the Qualified Teams competing in the next stage of its $119 million XPRIZE Water Scarcity competition. This multi-year global competition is designed to drive widespread access to clean water by creating reliable, sustainable, and affordable seawater desalination solutions. The announcement was made today during Climate Week in New York City.
Everyone on the planet is experiencing some form of water stress. Across the globe, 80% of the population already experiences serious threats to water supply, and by 2030, demand will outpace supply by 40%. While seas and oceans hold more than 96% of Earth’s water, desalination technologies remain expensive and energy-intensive,
limiting their use primarily to a small number of wealthier countries.
XPRIZE Water Scarcity seeks to unlock breakthroughs that can make desalination a viable and accessible solution for regions everywhere.
From over 674 pre-registered teams across 86 countries, 143 Qualified Teams were selected through a rigorous evaluation of their proposed solutions.
Teams are advancing across two tracks: reimagining System-Level Innovation (Track A) and developing Novel Materials and Methods for saltwater separation (Track B). Track A
Qualified Teams (93) demonstrated strong potential to produce at least 1 m³/day of potable water by the end of 2025 and were awarded a share of $3,000,000 to support their ongoing work in the next phase of the competition. Track B Qualified Teams (50)
demonstrated technical maturity and the ability to advance to the next round by proving, at a laboratory scale, the potential of new materials designed to replace conventional seawater reverse osmosis (SWRO) membranes as well as evolutionary advances that improve and adapt existing technologies, with results expected in early 2026.
Qualified Teams will now put their ideas into practice through field testing and validation.
Track A teams will deploy working desalination prototypes at their chosen sites, producing at least 1,000 liters of drinking water per day over two weeks, while meeting local environmental standards.
Track B teams will validate their novel separation materials and methods at lab scale, with results evaluated for technical maturity, efficiency, cost, and sustainability to prepare for live demonstrations.
A total of $108M in milestone awards is available to Track A teams and $10.9M to Track B teams as they progress through the competition.F ollowing Qualified Teams testing, XPRIZE will advance as many as 20 Track A Teams and as many as 30 Track B Teams as Semifinalists, awarding up to $5.3M (USD) in milestone awards.
“The diversity and creativity of these teams give us hope for the future of water,” said Lauren Greenlee, executive vice president of Food + Water + Waste, XPRIZE. “From academic labs to deep-tech startups, and cross-disciplinary consortiums—many from the world’s most water-stressed regions – these innovators are tackling desalination
from every angle.
Their ideas have the potential to lower costs, reduce environmental impact, and bring seawater desalination within reach for communities that need it most.”
XPRIZE Water Scarcity is the first competition of its kind focused on disrupting desalination systems at this scale. Outside of additional milestone funding, XPRIZE will award at the conclusion of the competition:
● $40 million to the Track A team that can reliably produce one million liters of
potable water per day at breakthrough affordability — enough to serve 10,000
people for a year.
● $8 million to the Track B team that pioneers a novel, durable desalination
material or method that can operate for at least 10 years.
The title sponsor of XPRIZE Water Scarcity is the Mohamed bin Zayed Water Initiative, which is dedicated to raising awareness of water scarcity and increasing its prioritization on the international agenda while accelerating the development, testing and deployment at scale of transformative and sustainable technological solutions to this global challenge.
