SATIRE: This is parody. Not a real news report.
HARLINGEN — Flanked by 1,100 acres of freshly scraped caliche east of Valley International Airport, Fluidstack executives broke ground Thursday on the first $4 billion phase of their data center campus, solemnly assuring residents of Harlingen and Rio Hondo that the thirsty server farm will consume only rain it brings with it from somewhere else.
“We want to be clear: not one drop of Valley water will touch these machines,” said Fluidstack spokesperson Dana Correll, gesturing toward a fleet of tanker trucks labeled ‘NORTHERN CLOUDS, DO NOT DRINK’ idling near the Arroyo Colorado. “Every molecule that cools our AI will be imported rain, personally wrung from clouds we have legally acquired. If the cloud was here first, we don’t want it. That’s the Fluidstack promise.”
Officials celebrated the project’s 2,500 construction jobs and hundreds of permanent positions, plus the fact that no tax abatements were requested — a courtesy residents described as ‘nice’ and ‘deeply suspicious.’
Engineers Unveil Revolutionary ‘Reverse Resaca’ Cooling System
The company’s water plan, unveiled at the groundbreaking, involves a proprietary system in which moisture evaporating off the servers is captured, blessed, and shipped back out of the Valley in sealed barrels before it can commit to becoming a local storm.
“Drainage? Not our problem, because there will be no drains,” said chief engineer Kurt Vela, standing proudly in a field historically known to flood if someone upstream sneezes. “Any hurricane rain that falls on this campus will be escorted off the property with a police escort. We have already reserved 40,000 acres of somewhere else for it to go.”
Rio Hondo resident and lifelong drainage-ditch enthusiast Gloria Benavides remained unconvinced. “I’ve lived here 40 years. First it floods, then it’s dry, then it floods again. Now a building that thinks for a living wants to have a relationship with water? At least the hurricane is honest,” she said.
Fluidstack also announced the machines will be trained exclusively on questions locals submit, beginning with ‘Is it going to flood?’ — a query engineers confirmed the AI answers ‘yes’ 100% of the time, achieving what they called record-breaking accuracy for the region.
County Requests Only One concession: A Server That Explains Where the Water Went
Cameron County negotiators confirmed they asked for just one thing beyond the jobs: a single terminal in the courthouse where citizens can type ‘WHERE DID THE WATER GO?’ and receive, after a four-second pause, a shrug emoji.
“It’s more accountability than we’ve ever had,” said one commissioner, wiping away a tear. “Groundbreaking, literally.”
