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WATTERpedia
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WATTER

From WATTERpedia, the WATTER internal knowledge base

WATTER, Inc. is an American technology company that deploys graphics processing unit (GPU) servers inside hotel and residential buildings, captures the waste heat generated by artificial intelligence workloads, and routes it into the building's domestic hot water system.[1] The company sells the resulting compute capacity through OASIS, a managed AI inference platform that serves both open-weight and commercial language models.[2][10] WATTER is a 2024 spinout from Hunt Innovative Technologies (HIT), part of the Hunt Energy organization, and is headquartered in Dallas, Texas.[3][4]

The company describes its approach as "heat-aware AI inference," with workloads steered to devices that have current thermal demand so that compute revenue and displaced natural gas heating combine to subsidize the cost of AI inference.[2] Its first commercial node, in the central plant of the Hyatt Regency Dallas Reunion Tower, entered production in late 2025 and is scheduled for full-rack scale-up in mid-2026.[2][5]

History

Origins and spinout

WATTER's underlying technology was developed inside Hunt Innovative Technologies (HIT), an affiliate of the Hunt Consolidated family of companies. The earliest patent provisional in the family was filed by Hunt Energy on August 15, 2022, with the non-provisional filed in August 2023.[12]

A Series Seed term sheet for the spinout was signed on December 20, 2024.[3] On February 20, 2025, the new entity was simultaneously formed and converted from a Delaware limited liability company to a Delaware corporation, with HIT contributing the operating assets — physical prototypes, software, domains, and trademarks — and Hunt Energy Company, L.P. contributing the patent family.[13][16] In exchange, the contributing entities received 100 percent of the membership interests in the new company.[13] The Certificate of Incorporation authorizes shares of Common Stock, Series Seed-1 Preferred, and Series Seed-2 Preferred.[16] The corporation received its IRS Employer Identification Number on February 21, 2025.[17]

The Series Seed-1 financing closed on February 21, 2025; further USPTO-recordable instruments perfecting the patent and trademark transfers were executed on April 20, 2025, alongside an Intercompany Services Agreement under which HIT continues to provide WATTER with strategic, intellectual-property, and corporate-legal services.[14][15][18][19] WATTER's operational headquarters is at 1035 / 1039 East Levee Street in Dallas — approximately 7,160 square feet of office and warehouse space shared with co-tenant Blair Built.[22] At the time of the spinout and Series Seed-1 closing the company was represented by Kastner Gravelle LLP; current outside corporate counsel is Eric Blatt of Scale LLP, with Tim Bliss and Bill Naifeh of Naifeh | Bliss serving as outside intellectual-property counsel.[27][29]

Funding

The Series Seed-1 financing closed on February 21, 2025, raising $5 million on a $20 million pre-money valuation. Tracey Maynor was the sole investor at the Initial Closing, purchasing Series Seed-1 Preferred Stock through his investment vehicle H20ENG LLC.[18] The board comprises five seats: the chief executive officer (Hancock); a Series Seed-1 director designated by H20ENG (Maynor); a second Series Seed-1 director designated by HIT (Daniel Price); and two Series Seed-2 directors designated by HIT.[19]

In 2026 the company began raising a Series A targeted at $25 million, with proceeds earmarked for a ten-site commercial rollout, the OctoWATT residential channel, and the defense pipeline.[2]

Prototypes

Earlier prototype milestones include a 2022 "Hot Chocolate" proof-of-concept that used waste heat from cryptocurrency mining hardware to heat water at a holiday party, followed by a 2023 GPU-based demonstration unit, and pre-production and revenue-generating residential units in 2024 and 2025.[7] At the time of the February 2025 contribution, three prototype units were operating in the homes of CEO James Hancock, then-HIT Chief Innovation Officer Todd Benson, and Hunt Energy CEO Hunter Hunt.[13]

Technology

WATTER's architecture is described in the company's literature as a three-layer stack.[2]

Hardware

WATTER sells two distinct hardware configurations at very different scales:

Hotel/commercial rack. A production rack contains eight servers totaling 64 Nvidia Blackwell B200 GPUs, drawing approximately 100 kilowatts of IT load, installed behind the meter in existing buildings.[2][8] The systems use a closed dielectric two-phase liquid cooling loop developed by partner Seguente, Inc. (the COLDWARE platform), with a coolant inlet at approximately 75°F and outlet at 140°F.[5][8] Captured heat is transferred to the building's potable water domestic hot water supply through a custom potable-water-rated heat-rejection unit.[5] The pilot configuration delivered to the Hyatt Reunion Tower in late 2025 was a single 5U Lenovo ThinkSystem SR780a V3 server with eight B200 GPUs and approximately 12 kW maximum design power; the full-rack production configuration scales this to 64 GPUs.[5][8]

The Hyatt installation specifically uses two Seguente 4U brazed-plate heat exchangers — a pCDU60-PW (refrigerant-to-water) between the GPU cold-plate loop and the hotel's domestic hot water return, and an HRU60-PW (water-to-water) between the hotel's condenser water and the same DHW loop — each rated for 64 kW at a 4 K approach temperature difference, supporting R1234ze, R515b, and R1233zd refrigerants.[31] The new mechanical IT Room also houses two 100-gallon Vaughn P-Series carbon-steel buffer tanks and a 3-horsepower Bell & Gossett vertical inline recirculation pump rated for 105 gpm.[32] The full mechanical and electrical engineering package was prepared by BKH Engineering of Fort Worth, Texas, with the 100% Review revision D dated February 2, 2026.[32]

Heat-rejection architecture. Each commercial site is engineered with three independent heat-rejection pathways so the cluster's thermal output is never gated by host hot-water demand. Approximately 16 percent of IT heat leaves through air cooling of ancillary components; approximately 40 percent is recovered into the building's domestic hot water through the potable-water heat exchangers; the remaining ~44 percent is routed to a WATTER-provided dry cooler or cooling tower, with an option to tie into the host's existing chilled-water plant where one is available.[35] At the cold plate, the liquid loop captures roughly 84 percent of the IT heat at source, but the useful share — the portion ultimately delivered to the hotel's potable hot water — averages around 40 percent for a 100 kW rack serving a 250-key, 65 percent occupancy hotel, because a full rack out-produces that property's domestic-hot-water demand by approximately 1.7×.[35]

WATTER Apollo (residential). The residential appliance — currently branded Apollo and previously codenamed Squid — is a Vaughn-manufactured electric water heater tank topped with a compute "shroud" containing two Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 GPUs, an Intel 14500 CPU, 128 GB of RAM, and 4 TB of storage.[20][21] It is currently offered as a single 50-gallon (S50) model, designed as a drop-in replacement for any standard 240-volt, 30-ampere residential electric water heater installation.[20] An 80-gallon (S80) variant documented in earlier marketing materials has been discontinued, and the GPUs were upgraded from the RTX 4090 specification documented in the Trinity One-Pager.[21] Apollo is the residential device; the OctoWATT consumer plan is one channel for deploying it, with homeowner compensation routed through the energy bill via Octopus Energy.[23]

OASIS

OASIS is the commercial channel through which WATTER sells its compute. It is a managed large language model inference platform accessed through an OpenAI-compatible REST API, with a customer portal, multi-tenant governance, and metered billing.[2][10] The platform serves open-weight models including Qwen 3.5, DeepSeek V3.2, GLM-5, Kimi K2.5, Nvidia Nemotron Super 49B, Llama 4, and Mistral, and additionally gateways commercial models from OpenAI and Anthropic through the same interface so customers can compare or migrate between them.[10]

WATTER positions OASIS toward two customer segments: startups using the platform for proof-of-concept work and enterprises seeking to migrate AI workloads off commercial APIs.[10] OASIS is offered as four distinct revenue lines — hardware sales, usage-based AI access, platform licensing of the management layer as standalone infrastructure, and network effects from each new deployment expanding the available GPU pool.[10] The platform's API surface includes chat completions, embeddings, image generation, audio transcription, text-to-speech, and batch processing.[10]

Heat-aware routing

The third layer steers inference workloads to the racks whose host buildings have current hot-water demand, so that the computation produces useful thermal output rather than waste.[2] The company reports that this design approach yields an Energy Reuse Effectiveness (ERE) of 0.210 against a baseline of 1.0 for conventional data centers, contributing to roughly 40 percent lower per-rack operating expenditure.[2]

Patent and intellectual property

The architecture is protected by United States Patent 11,974,412 B2, "System and Method for Using Waste Heat Generated by Digital Processing Components," issued April 30, 2024 with an earliest priority date of August 15, 2022.[12][14] The patent's published application appears as US 2024/0057289 A1 (February 15, 2024).[12] In addition to the issued patent, three further applications are pending: a US continuation-in-part (18/622,064), a Patent Cooperation Treaty application, and a US provisional filed in February 2025.[14] The patent's algorithmic claim — economic-aware modulation of compute load against a building's hot-water demand profile — is the technical basis WATTER cites for the "heat-aware routing" capability of its OASIS platform.[2][12]

The patent names seven inventors: Todd W. Benson, James A. Hancock, Hunter L. Hunt, John-Paul Adams, John S. Burkhart, James D. Franks, and Lovis Kauf (the only inventor listed at a non-US address on the patent — Eisenberg, Germany — though Kauf is currently based in Richardson, Texas, where he serves as an independent contractor on WATTER's residential product line).[12][26] WATTER has also filed five trademark applications with the USPTO covering the wordmark "waTTer," the taglines "The Liquid Asset," "An Investment That Holds Water," and "Bank on Your Water Tank," and an infinity logo design.[13]

Operations

As of May 2026, WATTER reports eleven operating sites:[2]

Business model

WATTER's hotel partnerships use a three-phase commercial model, with the "Free Heat" phase as the default.[8] Hotels receive a cash energy reimbursement plus free hot water, while WATTER retains the compute revenue. At higher levels of platform maturity, hotels pay WATTER for thermal output beyond their needs.[8] The framework is operationalized through a Deployment Partner Agreement — a bilateral master template (currently in draft form, dated December 19, 2025) under which each individual hotel or host site is documented as a "Project Plan" addendum that specifies the per-site revenue share, energy reimbursement formula, term length, and utility-cost adjustment trigger.[28]

In the residential market, the OctoWATT plan removes upfront cost for homeowners by having WATTER fund the hardware and installation, with revenue from the compute capacity used to offset (or eliminate) the homeowner's electricity bill.[7]

Per-site economics

The company's Series A financial model puts annual compute revenue per LG-class hotel deployment at $1,681,920, computed as 64 GPUs × $3.00 per GPU-hour × 8,760 hours, with a 10 percent annual decline in GPU rental rates assumed.[8] Total capital expenditure per site is approximately $3.59 million; under an 80 percent debt and 20 percent equity capital structure at 5.5 percent interest, the company reports an equity payback of approximately five months and a five-year internal rate of return of 20.3 percent.[8] A market scan of public B200 pricing in May 2026 across more than fifteen neocloud providers found the lowest publicly transactable rate at $2.89 per GPU-hour (on Vultr's 36-month reservation) and a marketplace median of approximately $5.00 per GPU-hour; WATTER's $3.00 baseline therefore sits roughly 30 percent below the marketplace median and approximately 4 percent above the public floor, positioning the company in the lowest tier of competitively transactable B200 capacity — a position the company justifies on the basis of heat monetization, framing the rack as paying for itself twice through compute revenue plus displaced gas.[34]

An internal working budget Excel underlies the 10-deployment PDF and Series A model and provides the supporting detail for the company's hiring plan: 25 employees by Q1 2027, scaling to 39 by Q3 2027.[30]

Cost compared to traditional data centers

Industry benchmarks (Orennia, citing Stanford and Cushman & Wakefield) put the construction cost of a US gas-powered 1 GW hyperscale data center at approximately $60 billion — $41 billion of IT hardware (GPU $30B, networking $4B, CPU/storage $3B, in-room CapEx $3B, deployment $1B) plus $19 billion of infrastructure (labor $4.7B, materials $3.9B, gas plant $3B, tenant fitout $2.6B, electrical $1.8B, mechanical $1.7B, soft costs $1.5B), with a 5- to 7-year utility-interconnect wait considered the binding constraint.[33]

Delivering the same 1 GW of compute as 10,000 distributed WATTER sites of 100 kW each, at the company's $3.59 million per-site baseline, totals approximately $36 billion — roughly $34 billion of IT hardware and $2 billion of install labor and manifold tie-ins.[8][30] The implied CapEx reduction is approximately $24 billion, or about 40 percent, before any operating-cost advantages are counted.[8] The savings derive from reusing infrastructure already present in the host hotel — mechanical room, electrical service, fiber, and domestic-hot-water demand — rather than constructing it from scratch, and from sidestepping the utility-interconnect queue by sitting behind the meter.[8] On the operating side, closed-loop liquid cooling eliminates approximately one million gallons of cooling water per rack per year relative to an evaporatively-cooled comparator, captured waste heat displaces roughly $30,000 per site per year of hotel gas consumption, and the deployment runs at a power-usage effectiveness of 1.05 versus an industry average closer to 1.30.[8]

Partnerships

WATTER has named the following commercial relationships:[2]

In September 2025 WATTER executed a Statement of Work with Seguente, Inc. for the delivery of the first production rack to the Hyatt Reunion site, with WATTER classified as the exclusive customer for Seguente's potable-water-rated coolant distribution and heat-rejection units.[5]

Government and defense

In 2025 WATTER received a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II contract from the United States Air Force (AFWERX / Air Force Research Laboratory) for $1,249,802 (contract FA864925P0422, topic AFX255-DPCSO3), with the period of performance running from September 2025 to March 2027.[9] The award is a small business set-aside; Jack Smith is the named Principal Investigator.[9][24]

Per public Series A materials, the company is pursuing a congressional add for approximately $5 million per year of recurring defense revenue, alongside a Department of Defense pitch for the OASIS inference platform.[2] The proposed add is reportedly being sponsored in the United States House of Representatives by Rep. Julie Johnson (D-TX) and Rep. Mike Bost (R-IL), with Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) and Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) tracking the measure for action when it reaches the United States Senate floor.[11] The bipartisan, two-state pairing reflects the company's Dallas headquarters and the Scott AFB end-user site in Illinois.[11]

Recognition

WATTER and its founder have received the following recognitions:

See also

References

  1. WATTER Brand Standards, p. 6.
  2. WATTER Series A — Deck Summary.
  3. WATTER — Series Seed Term Sheet (Signed), December 20, 2024.
  4. WATTER Brand Standards, p. 44 (stationery, marketing address).
  5. Phase 2 Statement of Work between Seguente, Inc. and WATTER, LLC, September 16, 2025.
  6. WATTER Series A — Deck Summary, p. 4 (Capital channel: "Closed $5M seed closed March 2025").
  7. Pitch Deck WATTER Commercial.
  8. WATTER Series A — Financial Model and Assumptions.
  9. USAF Contract FA864925P0422.
  10. Oasis Platform Summary, internal product document, WATTER, Inc.
  11. Disclosed by company representative, May 2026; congressional sponsorship for the proposed add has not yet been independently verified through public legislative records.
  12. United States Patent Application Publication US 2024/0057289 A1, "System and Method for Using Waste Heat Generated by Digital Processing Components," published February 15, 2024 (issued as US Patent 11,974,412, April 30, 2024).
  13. WATTER, L.L.C. Contribution and Assignment Agreement, February 20, 2025.
  14. Patent Assignment Agreement between Hunt Energy Company, L.P. and WATTER, Inc., April 20, 2025.
  15. Intercompany Services Agreement between Hunt Innovative Technologies, L.L.C. and WATTER, Inc., April 20, 2025.
  16. WATTER, Inc. Certificate of Incorporation, February 20, 2025; WATTER, L.L.C. Plan of Conversion (Delaware LLC to Delaware Corporation), February 20, 2025; WATTER, Inc. Bylaws, adopted February 20, 2025.
  17. Internal Revenue Service, Notice CP 575 A (employer identification number assignment), February 21, 2025.
  18. WATTER, Inc. Series Seed-1 Preferred Stock Purchase Agreement, February 21, 2025 (Exhibit A — Schedule of Purchasers).
  19. WATTER, Inc. Voting Agreement, February 21, 2025.
  20. Trinity One-Pager and WATTER Squid 50gal and 80gal Dimensions, internal product documents, WATTER, Inc. (these documents predate the product's rebrand to Apollo and reflect the earlier S50/S80 model lineup with RTX 4090 GPUs).
  21. Internal product update disclosed by WATTER, May 2026: 80-gallon model discontinued; residential GPUs upgraded from RTX 4090 to RTX 5090.
  22. WATTER HQ Information (Blair Built proposal memo); arrangement confirmed accepted per company representative, May 2026.
  23. The Series A deck attributes the count of ten deployed residential units specifically to "OctoWATT homes." Per a company representative (May 2026), the figure refers to the total deployed residential Apollo unit count and is not tied specifically to the Octopus Energy channel.
  24. Set-aside designation clarified by WATTER, May 2026: the contract is a general small business set-aside, not the Women-Owned Small Business (WOSB) designation that the SF1449 cover form's prominent header text might suggest.
  25. Recognitions disclosed by WATTER, May 2026; not yet independently verified through public award announcements.
  26. WATTER, Inc. Independent Contractor Agreement (Lovis Kauf), February 20, 2025 (Richardson, Texas address).
  27. Current legal counsel disclosed by WATTER, May 2026.
  28. WATTER, Inc. Deployment Partner Agreement (draft), December 19, 2025.
  29. IP counsel disclosed by WATTER, May 2026. Bill Naifeh was already the trademark address-of-record on the WATTER wordmark Notice of Allowance (October 22, 2024) under the predecessor firm name "Law Office of Bill Naifeh"; the firm has since organized as Naifeh | Bliss with Tim Bliss as named partner.
  30. WATTER Budget 05_09_26.xlsx, internal working budget Excel (9 sheets, May 9, 2026); the underlying file supporting the company's 10-deployment PDF budget. Used here for headcount-plan figures only.
  31. Seguente Product Solutions: pCDU60-PW and HRU60-PW datasheet, Seguente Inc.
  32. Hyatt Regency Dallas — WATTER Heat Recovery, 100% Review (Revision D), BKH Engineering, Fort Worth, TX (Project #25050), February 2, 2026.
  33. Orennia, "It costs $60 billion to build a 1 GW data center" (infographic), citing Stanford University and Cushman & Wakefield as underlying sources. Compared against WATTER's per-site baseline of $3.59M / 100 kW (see BASELINE_ASSUMPTIONS.md and ref. [8]); 1 GW WATTER scenario = 10,000 × $3.59M ≈ $35.9B.
  34. B200 public-pricing scan (May 2026): aggregated from getdeploying.com/gpus/nvidia-b200, thundercompute.com/blog/nvidia-b200-pricing, spheron.network, silicondata.com, and the published pricing pages of Vultr, Lambda Labs, Vast.ai, CoreWeave, RunPod, Hyperbolic, Nebius, Koyeb, UpCloud, Lyceum, Sesterce, Verda, Cirrascale, Packet·ai, and JarvisLabs. Cross-checked May 27, 2026.
  35. Heat-rejection architecture and capture-vs-delivered reconciliation per CEO direction, May 2026; see also hardware-architecture and per-site-economics wiki concept pages for engineering detail and the open reconciliation item (ERE 0.210 / PUE 1.05 vs the 40 percent delivered fraction the financial model books). The dry cooler / cooling tower is delivered as part of WATTER's $200K per-site facility build line.

This article is a synthesis of WATTER, Inc.'s internal source documents as of May 2026 and follows Wikipedia stylistic conventions. Forward-looking statements regarding the Series A round, deployment schedule, and revenue projections are presented as company plans rather than as fact.

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