alt Hacker NewsYou need on the order of 15 permanent onsite employees to run a datacenter; 5 each for 24/7 coverage of security, building maintenance, and tech. You probably don't really need 24/7 onsite for building maintenance or tech. Traveling employees or (probably traveling) contractors can handle projects that exceed the local scope.
Should be able to locally source security and building maintenance, if the pay is good. These are skills that are needed everywhere. The onsite tech can likely be sourced locally too: first and foremost, they're remote hands ... knowledgeable remote hands are nicer, but the mandatory skills are: read and follow directions, notice and report unusual circumstances, lift and manipulate heavy objects. It's not rocket surgery.
If you put your datacenter in the near boonies, say 30 minutes away from the nearest suburb, you can usually still find the big lots you need, and people can commute from there: a 30 minute commute with no traffic isn't too awful. Of course, you'll have neighbors on large lots who didn't think through that living out on the boonies with no zoning meant noisy neighbors could move in. :P
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While most people wouldn't hesitate to travel 30 minutes out of town, the generally don't ever think to see if jobs exist 30 minutes out of town, and thus won't find the work there. When looking for work they search within the city they live in, not the next town over with a name they might not even know. This is a real problem for a lot of businesses that exist 30 minutes out of town.
In fairness, the companies behind these data centres are well known and have endless marketing budgets, so they can likely find a way to close that gap where the typical rural-based business cannot, but at the same time why take the risk when you can just as easily build the datacenter right beside the person you want to hire?
I don't consider 30 minutes away from town the "boonies", that's more like a normal commute. The boonies would be like a 3 hour drive in the Sonora desert.