US data centers use 17 to 19 billion gallons of water to cool their hot-running chips each year — and that number is expected to to triple in the next five years, according to the Water Foundation.

That’s an expensive and politically tricky proposition for investors throwing billions of dollars at the challenge of scaling up AI. One way to use less water is to do a better job monitoring the cooling fluids, a task that currently involves sending samples away to a laboratory for tests in a multi-day process.

Omen AI was founded in 2024 to solve that problem. The company is building a real-time sensor to determine whether valves were failing, or if bacteria growth in the system threatened to choke off water flow. After raising a $31 million Series A in June, Omen is now acquiring competitor Aquatic Labs in a $16 million cash-and-stock deal.

The deal came together after Omen founder Zach Laberge was introduced to Aquatic Labs’ CEO Allan Adams by an investor in the filtration space. Both startups were building real-time water sensors with complementary technology: Omen’s sensors looked for elements in the water, while the Aquatic Labs sensor tests its alkalinity.

Putting those two technologies in the same sensor creates a “much richer picture of the water and the fluid,” Adams told TechCrunch, while uniting their vision of automating what had previously been a slow, manual process.

The combination unites two classic species of founder: Laberge dropped out of college to pursue his first company, which did similar fluid analysis for large construction machines that depend on hydraulics. Adams was an academic, trained as a physicist, who spent much of his career developing advanced ocean sensing technology as an MIT professor and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute researcher before starting his company.

Now, with Adams as the company’s chief science officer, the combined teams are working to integrate both technologies into one sensor, which they expect to have on the market by early next year. Omen’s initial sensors will be monitoring chips pulling in 250 to 300 MW of power by the end of the year, worth about $5 to $7 billion, Laberge told TechCrunch, with the hope of being installed on the equivalent of 1 GW of chips by the end of 2027.

The added value is in uptime: If the fluid system gets out of whack, data center operators typically choose to dump the water rather than risk damage to their expensive equipment. That means shutting down operations until the fluid system is restored, which costs a lot of money. Monitoring lets data center operators use the same fluid for longer, and minimize the costs of a clean up.

Adams hopes to see their technologies have an impact outside of data centers as well, telling TechCrunch that “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.”AI companies once estimated as much as $4 trillion would be spent on AI infrastructure by 2030, but some investors have grown skeptical of the buildout, sending hyperscaler stocks plummeting in recent days. Omen’s team isn’t worried about shifting sentiment though, since their work comes after a data center has been built.

“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,” Laberge said. “Our view is, if there’s tightness, this is still going to be the biggest market in human history, even if you sliced it in half.”