Texas Man's Big-Bucks Idea Involves Data Center Workers

In a dusty patch of rural Texas, one family's home has morphed into a frontline business in America's AI boom. The New York Times' Juliet Macur drops in on the Elmdale Outpost, a former two-bedroom house outside Abilene that 48-year-old Sam Holt Jr. has turned into a beer-heavy convenience store serving the thousands of workers building the $25 billion Frontier data center complex, part of OpenAI's Stargate program. Many live in a 148-acre RV park built specifically to house them as they work to construct 11 buildings, an effort that is expected to last into late 2028.

Macur traces how Holt, grieving the December death of his father who had owned the yellow house, decided to "adapt" and cash in. The grandkids' bedroom is now a walk-in beer cave; the kitchen bar is a checkout counter; the living room wall holds a sliding door that functions as a drive-through window. As for how Holt's gambit is faring, he's been open since Memorial Day and did $3,000 in sales on the day Macur profiled him; he hopes to make enough over the next two years to pay for his two daughters' college and then retire to a Honduran island. Read the full story.