XPRIZE Water Scarcity at WEX Global 2025

We are proud to welcome XPRIZE Water Scarcity as a Sustainability Partner at WEX Global 2025. With a groundbreaking $119 million prize, XPRIZE is transforming how we approach one of humanity’s most pressing challenges: global water scarcity.

At WEX Global 2025, you’ll have the opportunity to dive deeper into XPRIZE’s vision and the innovations being developed to create a water-secure future.

ABOUT XPRIZE WATER SCARCITY

XPRIZE Water Scarcity is a $119 million, 5-year prize designed to increase widespread access to clean water by creating reliable, sustainable, and affordable seawater desalination systems. By 2030, we’ll only have enough water to meet less than half of growing demand. Traditional desalination methods are expensive and have harmful impacts on the environment and marine ecosystems, making them an unsustainable solution to mitigating water scarcity.

Competing teams will develop new desalination technologies to unlock access to Earth’s ocean water year round, helping drive a world where clean water is equitably and sustainably abundant, and enabling people and the environment to prosper. This multi-track competition centers around a core track to rethink the desalination system; the winning team will reliably and most sustainably generate one million liters of potable water per day (1,000 m3/d) from seawater at the lowest cost, below current industry benchmarks, over the course of 1 year. In the Novel Membrane Materials track, the winning team will demonstrate a novel membrane that cansustainably and cost-effectively treat seawater to potable water quality, using pressure-drivensalt-water separation, with an operational lifetime of 10 years or more. The novel membrane should be a direct replacement for or a novel innovation on seawater reverse osmosis (SWRO)membranes.

Learn more at xprize.org/water

XPRIZE Water Scarcity is part of XPRIZE’s Food + Water + Waste domain, which focuses on building toward a future of safe access to clean water, sanitation, and nutritious food for all. This grand challenge accelerates technologies, processes, and policies to create resilient, regenerative, and inclusive food systems, with aims to increase nutritional quality, reduce waste, and build novel water systems to provide equitable access to clean drinking water around the world.

PRIZE PURSE

• $108,000,000 (USD) will be disbursed to successful teams throughout Track A – Desalination: System-Level Innovation
• $10,900,000 (USD) will be disbursed to successful teams throughout Track B – Novel Membrane Materials
• $100,000 will be disbursed via the Ideas Competition – The Value of Water, which will launch in 2027.

PRIZE MILESTONES

• Launch – March 1, 2024
• Registration Deadlines
  • Novel Membrane Materials: January 31, 2025
  • Desalination: System-Level Innovation: March 31, 2025
• Qualifying Submission Deadlines
  • Novel Membrane Materials: February 28, 2025
  • Desalination: System-Level Innovation: April 30, 2025
• Qualifying Team Testing – 2025
• Semifinals Testing – 2026
• Finals Testing – 2026-2028
• Award Ceremony and Winners Announced – 2027-2028
• Impact Phase – 2028-2029

PRIZE VOICES

➔ Anousheh Ansari, chief executive officer, XPRIZE
“We are surrounded by a potentially groundbreaking solution to our increasing water scarcity challenges, yet innovation in seawater desalination has been largely stagnant. The world needs a cutting-edge breakthrough to make desalination a cost-effective and sustainable solution that could be adopted globally, enabling people and the environment to prosper.”

➔ Lauren Greenlee, PhD, executive vice president of Food + Water + Waste, XPRIZE
“With global water demand projected to outstrip supply by 40% by 2030, the timeliness of this competition couldn’t be more crucial. We’re confident this prize will initiate a necessary step-change in desalination efforts to help address global water scarcity. We know that breakthroughs can come from anywhere, and by focusing on system-level innovation and flexible criteria alongside exploration of novel materials, our goal is to broaden inputs from a wide variety of fields and vet all possible solutions.”