Bjorn Simundson

Bjorn Simundson is the founder of Atmosphere Ventures, Inc., a California-based company that builds machines which condense drinking water out of ambient humidity, and a technical adviser to CalCompute on water and infrastructure. An industrial designer by training and a UC Santa Barbara economics graduate, he works on the resource question that large-scale computing usually treats as somebody else’s problem. His argument is a simple inversion: a data center should be able to produce water for the community that hosts it rather than consume the water that community depends on.

That inversion is not rhetorical. Data centers use water to reject heat, and the cooling load that makes a compute cluster viable is also a standing draw on local supply — a tension that lands hardest in exactly the inland and agricultural parts of California where land and power are cheapest. Simundson’s contention is that the same thermodynamics runs both directions. A machine that moves large volumes of air across a cold surface to shed heat is already doing most of the work of condensing water from that air, and the humidity a cooling system currently treats as a nuisance is a harvestable output. Whether that can be made to pencil out at cluster scale is an engineering question, and it is the question he brings to the coalition.

Atmosphere Ventures, incorporated in Nevada in 2021, grew out of Moonshot Works, the Santa Barbara industrial design and engineering incubator Simundson founded and runs. The company’s first product is the Origen Wellspring AWG100, a self-filling water kiosk that produces upward of 100 gallons of drinking water a day from ambient humidity with no well, no water main and no delivery truck. It is manufactured by Therma-Stor, LLC of Madison, Wisconsin, and sold by Atmosphere Ventures as authorized reseller under a licensed desiccant-rotor patent. The company launched publicly on July 4, 2026, and its first production unit was installed at a commercial site in Kapalua, Maui, entering service in August 2026. The stated markets are businesses, government agencies, schools, charities and NGOs — buyers who need water where the infrastructure to deliver it does not reach.

The water work predates the company. Simundson was co-founder and chief executive of Molecule USA, which he represented at the West Houston Association’s Water Innovation Forum in April 2021, and he has carried the decentralized-supply argument into disaster and defense resilience circles as a member of InfraGard’s national disaster resilience council, where the working interest is water security. He has said he presented to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s 2020 Atmospheric Water Extraction program, work he credits with leading to a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers program for tow-behind generators. His design career began earlier and elsewhere: he holds a master of fine arts in industrial design from the Academy of Art University in San Francisco and won the 2005 Michelin Challenge Bibendum in sustainable mobility.

The through-line to CalCompute is sustainability, which is not an add-on to the statute but part of its stated purpose. SB-53 directs the consortium it establishes to advance artificial intelligence that is “safe, ethical, equitable, and sustainable,” and the framework report due to the Legislature on or before January 1, 2027, is where the physical facts of a public cluster — siting, cost, operations — get worked out on paper before anything is built. Simundson’s position is that the resource accounting belongs in that document rather than after it, while the design is still on the page and a cooling system can still be specified as something that gives water back.

Bjorn Simundson holds a master of fine arts in industrial design from the Academy of Art University and a bachelor’s degree in economics from UC Santa Barbara, and is based in Santa Barbara County. He is the founder of Atmosphere Ventures, Inc. and Moonshot Works, Inc. and a co-founder of Molecule USA.