It was quitting time at the giant construction site, sending the afternoon rush down a crumbling two-lane country road toward a new convenience store called the Elmdale Outpost.
Dust-covered pickup trucks from near and far — Louisiana, North Carolina, Mexico — pulled into its parking lot, and weary workers walked through the door, their boots leaving a trail of dirt inside.
The tiny Swiss Army knife of a shop carries anything the workers might need. Toothpaste and toilet paper, sweet potatoes and spicy-hot snacks, and beer. At every turn, ice-cold beer. An entire separate room of floor-to-ceiling beer. More than 60 brands, including a dozen varieties of michelada alone.
The store’s primary appeal, though, is its proximity to the construction site, six miles away. Or, more precisely, its proximity to the sprawling, new 148-acre R.V. park next door, built to serve thousands of temporary laborers.
An armada of those workers — pipe fitters, HVAC technicians, ironworkers and more — has come to this rural area at the northeast edge of Abilene, Texas, to build the $25 billion Frontier data center complex, part of the half-trillion dollar Stargate project that President Trump promoted last year as “the largest A.I. infrastructure project in history.” The flagship Stargate data center campus is also under construction, on the other side of town.
“Y’all opened up a good spot right here,” a foundation contractor from Colorado told the store owner, Sam Holt Jr., while buying a six-pack of Dos Equis.
After a 10-hour day in the Texas sun, he said he couldn’t resist the red sign painted on the store’s corrugated tin roof: “BEER.”
“Yep, we’re just trying to serve our new neighbors,” Holt replied.
Late last year, “neighbors” meant a handful of families living on open farmland. Now it means a deluge of strangers who live in one of the biggest R.V. parks in the country, with 2,300 narrow gravel parking spots lined up like endless rows of piano keys.
“Everything around here’s changed overnight,” Holt said to another customer, this one an electrician from a South Texas border town who had stopped in for two bags of Flamin’ Hot Doritos, a bottle of the Mexican spice Tajín to sprinkle into his beer and a 12-pack of Michelob Ultra.
“We’re here for the money while it lasts!” said the man, who said he has his first child on the way and was drawn to the data center site for its big paychecks.
Holt, 48, is making the best of the situation. Several months ago, his store was a two-bedroom house. His father’s house.
It was, as his father had described it, his “place among the wheat fields.”
After retiring from his luxury sedan service in Dallas, Sam Holt Sr. moved in 2015 to the little yellow house on a sliver of an acre on Elmdale Road North. He lived alone.
A Vietnam veteran who survived several bouts of cancer, he marveled at the views, taking photos of Creamsicle-hued sunrises from his front door and cotton-candy-colored sunsets from his back one. He would share them online.
“11/18/24 @1800hrs. Lookin’ out on my back door area. No city lights.”
“12/12/24 @ 0717hrs. Sittin’ in my front door. Good morning. I have been up since 0630hrs CST, and I have not heard a sound, barring the clicking of my iPhone as I type. No vehicles or birds. ZILCH! So peaceful.”
Holt Sr. attended the Hamby Church of Christ less than two miles away. Wrote poetry about growing up on a farm in Missouri. Made cedar chests and children’s tables, and also a five-tiered birdhouse — for 60 bird families, he boasted — that he tucked into a tree in his front yard.
Morning and night, he cooked his specialty: meatloaf, pinto beans and cornbread.
When a real estate agent offered $150,000 for his house last summer, maybe $25,000 more than it was worth, Holt Sr. declined. “Where am I supposed to go?” he said at the time. “I like it here, and I’m going to ride this out.”
A few months later, on Thanksgiving, Sam Holt Sr. went to the hospital. He died there on Christmas Eve at 81.
Sam Holt Jr.’s girlfriend, Stacey Sanford, first raised the idea of using the house to make money. Others were profiting from the A.I. construction project, so why shouldn’t they?
Having turned farmland into the R.V. park, the developer charges $675 a month per spot — and will gross more than $18.6 million a year in rent alone.
So Holt and Sanford drew up a plan to open a dry goods store that would sell beer. Holt was a longtime managing partner at Texas Roadhouse restaurants and had experience in customer service. He would quit his job to run the store, while Sanford, a health care executive, would join him on nights and weekends.
“I’m ready to make a change,” he told her.
“Let’s roll the dice and hope it works out,” she said.
Sam Holt Sr., religiously conservative, was against drinking alcohol. But he would have supported anything his son did to improve his life, and the lives of his grandchildren — his son was sure of it.
“He would know that we have to adapt,” Holt Jr. told Sanford. “A lot of people don’t want to adapt to this, but we have no choice.”
He and Sanford invested $75,000 and figured the store would last as long as the R.V. park — at least several years, considering that the data center developer, Vantage Data Centers, said construction of all 11 buildings on its 1,200-acre Shackelford County site would finish by late 2028.
The couple’s goal: pay for college for Holt’s two teenage daughters and then retire to an island off the coast of Honduras. Starting this new chapter, however, was complicated by grief.
From the living room wall, staple by staple, Holt Jr. removed the drawings his daughters had given his father, including ones of their teeny traced hands. The girls called their grandfather Silly Sam and had their own bedroom in the house.
That room became a walk-in beer cave, with silver insulation on the walls and refrigeration pumped in. The kitchen bar top became a checkout counter. A wall in the living room was fitted with a sliding door, to create a drive-through.
“Every time I see a sunset in the backyard, I think of him,” Holt said of his father. “And that’s every single night.”
Business is slow on weekday mornings.
Hours before Holt opens the store at 10 a.m., many workers have already left the R.V. park on their way to their jobs, creating a conga line of traffic that has warped and chipped the road’s asphalt. Some don reflective vests and hard hats, and board double-decker buses bound for the construction site.
One Wednesday last month, Holt prepared for a busy afternoon by unloading beer from a delivery truck. He orders smaller cases now than when he started, having learned that many customers prefer 6- and 12-packs because the refrigerators in their R.V.s don’t have much room.
Laurel Sullivan, a mother of two, was inside working the cash register. A month before, she had walked over from the R.V. park to ask if they needed any help, looking for something to do. She told Holt that she manages her toddlers and three dogs in their R.V. until her husband — a heavy machinery operator — returns from his 14-hour workday, and the days can be long. She hires a babysitter while she is at the store.
She and Holt go out of their way to befriend the regular customers, remembering their orders and their roles at the construction site, in an effort to create something of a community and help people feel less lonely.
There’s a Spanish-speaking boy, maybe 11 years old. He once tried to pay with a Nicaraguan dollar. This time, he brought a jar of Alfredo sauce to the counter so his sister could make lunch for him and his siblings, dropping a pile of coins in front of Sullivan — but they didn’t quite add up to the price.
“I got you,” she told him, reaching for her wallet to make up the difference. Holt gives children a free flavored ice.
There’s also the guy who drives his white F-250 pickup into the drive-through and wants a 30-pack of Miller Lite placed on the back seat. Yet another shows up every other day for two bottles of Mickey’s Fine Malt Liquor, a special order reserved just for him.
Around lunchtime, Brenda Talamante, the spouse of a welder, ordered a bag of ice at the drive-through. She had gotten up at 3:55 a.m. to cook her husband barbacoa and was now on her third cup of coffee.
“This is an adventure for us, but for some people, this is a chance to send money to their families back home,” she said from the seat of her red pickup. “Some people don’t realize that this is life-changing money.”
Holt and Sanford learned quickly that data center construction is lucrative. No one ever asked the price of anything, so they never bothered with price tags. Cashiers at the Elmdale Outpost — including one of Holt’s daughters — can leave a shift with $100-plus in tips.
More than a dozen workers at the R.V. park said that it was not uncommon for the data center laborers to receive a per diem of $150 to $250, and earn $200,000-plus a year — after taxes — in hourly wages.
A typical schedule is 10 to 14 hours a day for 13 days on, then one day off, with no paid vacation. For some, it is a good trade-off. They can now retire early. Or pay off their mortgage.
Many of these workers are Latino, and Holt, who is 6-foot-5 and friendly, chats with them in Spanish. He and Sanford stock Mexican brands, like Bimbo, but also take requests — a concrete worker asked for neck gaiters to keep out dust. Sometimes, they make educated guesses about what might be popular.
One day, Sanford shouted to Holt, “Hey, Sam, someone just bought five condoms and a 24-case of Coronas!” making both of them laugh.
She added, “Next up, they might need a pregnancy test — and turns out that we sell that, too!”
On that Wednesday night last month, Sanford had joined Holt after her full-time job and, almost two hours after a blushing sunset, they closed the store together.
They tallied the sales, $3,000 that day — about four times more than they made on Memorial Day weekend, their grand opening. It was 10:30 p.m., past bedtime for most of their neighbors, as they swept clumps of dirt off the floor and restocked shelves, adjusting every bottle in the coolers even a millimeter so its label was facing exactly forward. Holt would return less than 12 hours later; he has been working seven days a week.
They’re making these sacrifices because the window to profit off the data center won’t stay open forever. They try not to listen to the critics who say they have sold out to Big Tech.
Carye Adkins, a detective at the Abilene Police Department and a longtime friend of Holt’s, understands the dilemma.
Fourteen years ago, Adkins moved into his dream house — near the yellow one Holt Sr. would move into. He and his family had relocated from the city, and he remembers his young son running out back, in a newly plowed field, shouting, “Look, Dad, we got dirt!” Eventually, they had 17 cows and donkeys on their 20 acres.
Then the data center came, and then plans for the R.V. park.
Adkins told Holt that he couldn’t stand the idea of living right next to an R.V. park. Heartbroken, he sold his property to the developer.
Yet on opening day for the Elmdale Outpost, Adkins was the first customer through the door.
“All of this was devastating,” he told Holt. “But you deserve every penny you make off this.”
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