> People move towards places with growing economic opportunities.

Fleeting economic opportunities that don't survive the construction phase - a few months most. No one will move from New York to Texas for a chance to be one of the 17 long-term staff at a data center: no one wants to be a data center night man that badly.

> NYC population is declining after all [1] largely because the city would rather treat housing as a scarce resource for them to divy up than something to increase the supply of.

The Mayor is literally implementing stuff to build more affordable housing. I agree that ultimately a lot less regulation is needed to make it easier to simply build, but your take on it belongs in a New York Post editorial. It's not serious.

> The tech and finance elite will stay here but normal people who are trying to make a decent living in construction and similar trades will end up following opportunities.

Your dichotomy is bullshit. People in blue collar trades are no more "normal" than most of the people working white collar jobs in tech, finance, law, etc.

People move towards places with growing economic opportunities.

I hope people aren't expecting data centers to provide "growing economic opportunities". That's not really what data centers are about.

Data centers are infrastructure in the same way nuclear plants or canals are infrastructure. Water infrastructure carries the Colorado to Phoenix and other areas in the West. Unfortunately, this does little for people in Colorado. The idea is that the benefit of feeding water to people throughout the west is worth the cost of building and maintaining extensive water infrastructure.

AI infrastructure should be thought of in the same manner. If you're going to have a requirement that data centers provide all these jobs in the places they're built, then data centers are never going to be able to get out from under the PR hammer. And most citizens are going to continue to be disappointed. Because they're thinking about it wrong.