Data Center Workers Are Propping Up the RV Industry's Worst Slump

US wholesale RV shipments fell 13.7% through September year-over-year, yet dealers and park operators across Iowa, Texas and Louisiana say data center construction workers are keeping their businesses afloat. The AI infrastructure buildout has quietly built a second customer base for a leisure industry that, as one dealer puts it, is "usually the first into a recession and the last out."

At Amana RV Park & Event Center near Cedar Rapids, Iowa — a 450-campsite park that normally hosts up to 60 long-term campers — hundreds of workers building Google and QTS data centers have arrived from as far away as Oregon and Washington. Seventy Amazon packages piled up at the park one recent day, none of them for tourists. "It's like you're a landlord now, and you never used to be," manager Jamie Wolter said. Without these guests, she added, the gas-price-driven decline in RV tourism "would have been terrible."

Why are workers buying RVs?

Construction crews stay at a site for a few months to a few years, often in markets where hotels and short-term rentals are scarce or expensive. A travel trailer stretches a per diem further, allows family and pets, and moves to the next job. Finance teams at Clear Creek RVs in Abilene, Texas, have seen per diems of roughly $100 to $300 a day. A small trailer costs around $20,000, with loan payments of $400 a month or less; paired with a $600 campsite, total housing costs run about $1,000 a month before utilities, insurance and food.

Shannon Calkins, Clear Creek's marketing director, estimates data center workers now account for about half the dealership's business, up from 15% to 20% before the buildout, when worker purchases came mostly from pipeline and solar projects. At ATC RV Center in Cedar Rapids, data center workers kept unit sales roughly flat from a year earlier. "Without them, it would have been really slow for us," manager Joel Philipp said. The dealership used geofencing (location-based ad targeting) around data center construction sites, reaching workers browsing their phones on breaks — and some of them came in and bought.

Bayou Outdoor Supercenter in Louisiana goes further, offering workers on Meta's Hyperion project a calculator comparing hotel costs against buying an RV they can take to the next job. Most buyers pick smaller, cheaper travel trailers, though Philipp saw demand for $60,000-$70,000 fifth-wheel bunkhouse models shared by coworkers or tradespeople with families. Some buyers have thin credit histories, which makes loans harder and costlier — but the asset outlasts the job.

What's happening at the parks?

At Abilene RV Park in Texas, every weekly, monthly and long-term cabin space was full, with a waitlist of 20 to 30 people. The park raised its monthly rate by $50, to $600 plus electricity, to cover higher property taxes and upkeep. Manager Debbie Coffey holds about five of 66 spaces for pass-through guests she's counting on when construction winds down.

Near Meta's Richland Parish campus in Louisiana, Corporate Mobile Housing's Dunn Village offers rooms in mobile homes plus 170 spaces for workers' own RVs. Before Meta's late-2024 announcement, the company provided 300 beds; it now has 1,500, and director of strategic growth Heather Kleinpeter expects that to double next year. "People are just taking advantage of the opportunity on every level," she said. The company is planning five to seven years out and may relocate modular homes afterward.

Does the boom have an end date?

Yes, and a political one too. Meta says the expanded Richland Parish campus will support more than 7,500 jobs at peak construction but only 1,000 once operating. In this month's midterms, Texas elected Gina Hinojosa, who backs a statewide moratorium on new data center approvals, as governor; Texas accounts for about one in five US data center buildings planned or under construction, per Cleanview. Michigan elected Abdul El-Sayed, who has called for a pause, to the Senate, and several towns approved bans or restrictions.

Around Abilene, Calkins has watched new RV parks — some just crushed gravel and utility hookups — open in fields even as established parks turn away monthly renters. When work dries up, the crews will hitch up and move on; the parks they leave behind, she predicts, will sell for "pennies on the dollar."

The lesson for sellers of travel: this demand is real but temporary, and it comes bundled with a real-estate bet.