Representatives of Cumulonimbus, the cloud-computing giant whose regional AI campus already draws on two of the county’s three lakes, appeared before the Prairie Shoals town council Monday night to request the third, assuring residents that this would be “the last lake, most likely.”
“We hear the community’s concerns, and we want to be transparent,” said Blake Undersen, the company’s vice president of Community Hydration, presenting a slide of a lake with an arrow pointing to a data center. “Intelligence has a cost. Every time anyone asks a chatbot to make an email sound warmer, that warmth comes from somewhere. It comes from here. It comes from the lake.”
The proposal includes 11 permanent jobs, six of which involve monitoring the lake’s levels, a task the company concedes will simplify over time. Cumulonimbus has also offered community benefits: the remaining water will receive naming rights as Lake Cumulonimbus, the school district will get free AI tutoring, and a commemorative plaque at the former shoreline will honor “the lake’s contribution to the region’s compute.”
The company further pledged to become “water-positive” by 2035 through the purchase of hydration offsets, which company materials describe as certificates affirming that other water exists elsewhere.
Residents were not uniformly persuaded. “They told us the cloud was up there,” said Marjorie Plett, 71, gesturing at the sky. “It isn’t. It’s a building, it pays no property tax until 2044, and it’s thirsty.”
As a goodwill gesture, the company’s own chatbot composed a poem about water and read it aloud to the council. The poem ran slightly over 400 words, used the word “shimmering” nine times, and referred to the lake in the past tense throughout.
The council tabled the vote until September. Cumulonimbus thanked the town for its partnership in a press release issued, residents noted, before the meeting had ended.