Lighthouse Quick Takes - Abilene hotel rates surge after Stargate AI project

In this Lighthouse Quick Take, Blake explores what happened to hotel pricing in Abilene, Texas, home to Stargate, the $500 billion AI data center project announced by OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank in January 2025. Actualized pricing was flat in the low $90s through 2024, then climbed to a peak of $243 a night by March 2026, up about 126% comparing the first seven months of 2026 to the same stretch in 2024.

Blake breaks down why a single mega-project can outweigh a market's traditional seasonality, and what revenue managers in similarly sized markets should watch for before the next big build lands.