Kayla Caskey turned land her grandparents passed down into an RV park for the construction workers building Meta’s $27 billion Hyperion data center, a campus going up in rural Richland Parish in northeast Louisiana. She knows the workers won’t stay forever, according to Quartz.
Before South Stuart RV Park could open, about 25 minutes from the site, Caskey had to get through zoning rules and put in showers and bathrooms. Its 12 spaces filled quickly, and this spring it was still getting inquiries every day. “It may just be land out there again,” she told Fortune in March. “But hopefully, over the next couple of years, it’ll pay off while the workers are still here.”
Companies are pouring money into data centers like Hyperion faster than into almost anything else in the U.S. economy, and that spending now drives a large part of the country’s growth. In August, private companies were building data centers at a pace of roughly $85 billion annually, 73% more than a year earlier, according to the Census Bureau’s report released last week.
Business spending on AI-related equipment, software, research, and data centers made up 39% of all U.S. growth over the first nine months of 2025, a bigger share than the same kinds of spending at the height of the dot-com boom in 2000, researchers at the St. Louis Fed calculated.
