I'd say there's a bit of a difference, and I live in a city that's been dealing with that as a problem over the last couple of years.
If you have a pro sports team in your region, then you have mindshare among a significant chunk of the American public for months out of the year through broadcasts, blogs, articles, and now sports books. If you are, oh, I don't know, Kansas City, it might get you mindshare you wouldn't have otherwise. It's hard to put a price tag on mindshare, so cities think that it's worth it.
If you have a data center, you have... a data center. I don't think "jeeze, I need to go up 29 or 35 to Iowa soon" each time I spin up a new GCP project in us-central1.
Ultimately a lot of states - particularly in the middle of the country - have political power that is held by rural interests, regardless of whether that's where most of the population lives in that state. Missouri is an example of this: two major progressive-leaning cities and two mid-sized college towns that puts about 60-70% of the population as urban, but very rural/conservative state government. That state government is made of people who don't grasp what the hell a data center is, how it's run, and what it brings to the local economy. They think it's a slice of Silicon Valley, but it's not (and honestly, thank God for that), and it won't bring that sort of employment, but they can't suss that out.
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I'd say there's a bit of a difference, and I live in a city that's been dealing with that as a problem over the last couple of years.
If you have a pro sports team in your region, then you have mindshare among a significant chunk of the American public for months out of the year through broadcasts, blogs, articles, and now sports books. If you are, oh, I don't know, Kansas City, it might get you mindshare you wouldn't have otherwise. It's hard to put a price tag on mindshare, so cities think that it's worth it.
If you have a data center, you have... a data center. I don't think "jeeze, I need to go up 29 or 35 to Iowa soon" each time I spin up a new GCP project in us-central1.
Ultimately a lot of states - particularly in the middle of the country - have political power that is held by rural interests, regardless of whether that's where most of the population lives in that state. Missouri is an example of this: two major progressive-leaning cities and two mid-sized college towns that puts about 60-70% of the population as urban, but very rural/conservative state government. That state government is made of people who don't grasp what the hell a data center is, how it's run, and what it brings to the local economy. They think it's a slice of Silicon Valley, but it's not (and honestly, thank God for that), and it won't bring that sort of employment, but they can't suss that out.