As more parts of the world face intense drought, new technologies are emerging to clean and reuse existing water. Investors are seeing potential for big profits.

Water treatment is expensive. It uses a lot of energy and produces its own waste that gets disposed of at a hefty price. Capture6, a startup in Berkeley, California, says it’s developing a solution, and one with an added benefit to the environment.

Capture6’s technology repurposes industrial and water treatment waste, generating clean water and capturing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

“That combination of water treatment, brine management, and carbon capture all at once is part of what makes us unique, what makes our process innovative,” said Capture6 CEO Ethan Cohen-Cole, who co-founded the company in 2021. “We are able to do so at reduced energy costs.”

The process is complex. It starts with the waste from any sort of water treatment process. Once the solids are removed, that waste is called brine, which is leftover water plus concentrated salt – sodium chloride. Treatment facilities usually have to pay to get rid of it.

But Capture6 takes that brine, strips out the fresh water and separates the salt into sodium and chlorine. It then turns the sodium into lye.

“That lye has the really neat property that if you expose it to the air, it will bond with CO2 and strip it from the air, and that’s the punch line to the process,” said Cohen-Cole. “We have processed the waste salt, we’ve returned fresh water to our partner, and we’ve captured CO2 from the air.”

It’s a particularly attractive proposition in areas most in need of clean water. Capture6 is working in Western Australia, South Korea, and in drought-stricken California, at the Palmdale Water District north of Los Angeles. The district is still testing the technology, but is already projecting huge cost savings in its brine management.

“It will save us 10% on that capital cost, as well as saving us 20 to 40% in operational costs,” said Scott Rogers, assistant general manager at Palmdale Water District. “We’re recovering anywhere from 94% to 98% water out of water that would just normally be wasted.”

Rogers says it’s early but when more facilities start using the technology, it will create a circular economy that can benefit the environment.

Capture6 has raised $27.5 million from Tetrad Corporation, Hyundai Motors, Energy Capital Ventures, Elemental Impact and Triple Impact Capital. 

Cohen-Cole says the company’s entire process could run on renewable energy, so all of the CO2 that it captures will be net negative, improving the environment. That allows the company to generate added revenue by selling carbon credits.

It’s just one technology in a growing field of carbon capture, removal and sequestration. Others include direct air capture, burying carbon underground or injecting it into the ocean.

The Trump Administration recently canceled $3.7 billion worth of awards for new technology, including carbon capture, to fight climate change. Capture6 has received funding from the U.S. Department of Energy and from state-level sources including California, according to the company. So far, none of that has been canceled.

— CNBC producer Lisa Rizzolo contributed to this piece.

Amazon has formed a new group within its consumer product-development arm that is focused on agentic artificial intelligence, the company said Wednesday.

The team will be based in Lab126, the stealthy Silicon Valley-based research and development unit behind the Kindle e-reader, Echo smart speaker and other popular Amazon devices.

A growing number of companies are building AI agents as they look beyond text and image generators. In contrast to AI services such as chatbots, agents are capable of completing multistep, complex actions on a user’s behalf.

The new group will help develop an agentic AI “framework” for use in its robotics operations, an application often referred to as “physical AI.”

These systems enable robots to “hear, understand and act on natural language commands,” Amazon said.

Amazon’s AI lab released a web browser-based agent earlier this year. Its cloud unit has also formed its own agentic AI group. Amazon’s Alexa+, an AI-infused update of its voice assistant released in March, is also expected to have some agentic capabilities.

Nikesh Arora, the CEO of Palo Alto Networks, is joining Uber‘s board of directors, the company announced in a regulatory filing Wednesday.

It comes amid a broader executive shakeup this week at the ride-hailing company, which saw head of delivery Pierre-Dimitri Gore-Coty depart after 13 years. Andrew Macdonald, head of mobility, was promoted to president and chief operating officer, Uber’s first since 2019.

“I’m honored to join Uber’s Board at such an exciting time, as the company plays a central role in commercializing autonomous mobility around the world,” Arora said in a statement. “Uber has already fundamentally transformed how people and goods move through cities, and I look forward to contributing to the company’s continued success.”

Arora has been chairman and CEO of Palo Alto since 2018. Prior to that, he was president and chief operating officer of Softbank and also held positions at Google and T-Mobile. Arora has previously served the boards of Softbank, Sprint, Colgate-Palmolive and others, and currently sits on the board of a Swiss luxury-goods holding company. 

“Nikesh is one of the technology industry’s great executives: a strategic and disciplined operator, and a fierce competitor,” Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said in a statement. “We’re thrilled to welcome him to the board and look forward to his contributions as we continue to advance our long-term strategy.”

The shakeup comes as Uber faces increased competition, particularly in the robotaxi space.

Tesla is planning its long-awaited robotaxi launch in Austin on June 12. Alphabet-owned Waymo, which partners with Uber in Austin and Atlanta, recently hit 10 million paid driverless rides, with weekly rides jumping 150% in less than a year.

Food delivery competitor DoorDash has been aggressively expanding its reach, acquiring delivery firm Deliveroo and booking platform SevenRooms in the past month. 

The management changes, including the elevation of Macdonald, who will oversee delivery, mobility and autonomy, could allow Khosrowshahi to take on a more strategic role.

Khosrowshahi joined Uber in 2017, bringing it public in 2019 and to its first operating profit in 2021. Since then he has expanded the Eats and delivery business, smoothed over regulatory issues, and sold Uber’s in-house AV unit in favor of partnerships with companies like Waymo and the UK’s Wayve. 

“I recognize the change might prompt some questions about my future, so I’ll be clear: I have no plans to go anywhere anytime soon — other than fly around the globe trying to keep up with our ever-growing footprint,” Khosrowshahi told employees in an internal memo announcing the COO changes. 

For his board service, Arora will receive a $60,000 annual cash retainer and $300,000 of restricted stock units a year, according to the filing.