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• Spotting high potential areas for groundwater exploitation. • Application of two state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms. • Feeding only DEM-derived factors to the algorithms to determine groundwater potential. • Extreme gradient boosting and parallel random forest yielded AUC values of about 86% • Convergence, TWI, river density, and altitude are the most important factors. Groundwater (GW) resources provide a large share of the world's water demand for various sections such as agriculture, industry, and drinking water. Particularly in the arid and semi-arid regions, with surface water scarcity and high evaporation, GW is a valuable commodity. Yet, GW data are often incomplete or nonexistent. Therefore, it is a challenge to achieve a GW potential assessment. In this study, we developed methods to produce reliable GW potential maps (GWPM) with only digital elevation model (DEM)-derived data as inputs. To achieve this objective, a case study area in Iran was selected and 13 factors were extracted from the DEM. A spring location dataset was obtained from the water sector organizations and, along with the non-spring locations, fed into machine learning algorithms for training and validation. For delineating reliable GW potential, algorithms including random forest (RF) and its developed version, parallel RF (PRF), as well as extreme gradient boosting (XGB) with different boosters were used. The area under the receiver operating characteristics curve indicated that the PRF and XGB with linear booster give similar high accuracy (about 86%) for GWPM. The most important factors for accurate GWPM in the modeling procedure were convergence, topographic wetness index, river density, and altitude. Overall, we conclude that high-accuracy GWPMs can be produced with only DEM-derived factors with acceptable accuracy. The developed methodology can be employed to produce initial information for GW exploitation in areas facing a lack of data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]