SATIRE: This is parody. Not a real news report.
HARLINGEN — At a groundbreaking ceremony Tuesday on 1,100 acres east of Valley International Airport, Fluidstack executives announced that the company’s $4 billion data center campus will use a revolutionary closed-loop cooling system so self-sufficient that the clouds forming above it will be company property.
“We are not asking Harlingen for water, tax abatements, or weather,” said Fluidstack spokesperson Doreen Vleck, standing beside a ceremonial shovel plugged into a portable server rack. “Any rain that falls on our campus will be rain we made ourselves, cooled ourselves, and, if necessary, widened the canal for ourselves.”
The company confirmed it is seeking city permission to discharge stormwater into a city-owned canal near the airport, and has offered $7 million to widen the canal if its machine-made rain proves excessive. “We don’t want to inconvenience the canal,” Vleck added. “The canal was here first. We’ve been in due diligence since January, and most of that was learning the canal’s boundaries out of respect.”
Valley Residents Skeptical Clouds Can Hold A Job
Not everyone is convinced. At a taqueria down FM 510 toward Rio Hondo, locals debated whether a corporation can legally own precipitation. “First they take the land, then the water, now the sky?” said one retiree who asked to be identified only as Abuelo. “In the Valley the sky is the one thing that was still free, and honestly it mostly just gives us heat.â€
Fluidstack says the campus will create 2,500 construction jobs and several hundred permanent positions, including a dedicated Moisture Reconciliation Team that will track every drop of self-generated rain and file reports confirming none of it came from Harlingen’s municipal supply. “If a stray cloud from Brownsville drifts over our property, we will invoice Brownsville,” said cooling engineer Dale Farenthold. “That’s just accountability.”
City officials, meanwhile, have asked only one thing of the tech giant: that during hurricane season, its proprietary rain politely wait its turn behind the real rain, which has seniority.
