The actual issue is that they don't. A 100 MW steel mill might employ ~1000 people and contribute ~$1 billion/year to the economy. A 100 MW data center doesn't need that many people even during construction, and its economic contributions are attributed to the location of corporate offices. As far as local people are concerned, any other use for the electricity would be more valuable than a remotely owned data center.

>Yes it's a huge job creation/economics boon as well

Is it though? Maybe the construction itself but after that running a data center doesn't need that many on-premise people, like it can be in the two digit range which is not a lot at all. And even then on-premise people won't be the highest paid engineer jobs but rather security and technicians.

Datacenters certainly provide many construction jobs during that phase of the project.

During normal operations though, you would have a handful of technicians, probably a facilities manager and frequent contractor visits, probably onsite security.

The facilities contractors may come from far away for maintenance projects, so maybe you help support local hospitality businesses.

Most of the highly paid work at the datacenter will happen remotely.

Every so often, there will be a hardware refresh, but you probably bring in people from elsewhere to do those, if it doesn't make sense to have the onsite techs do it little by little.

Certainly, there's a lot of equipment installed, and any locality with property tax on business equipment should get value from that. But otherwise, almost any other light industrial business would have more employees.

It is actually terrible at job creation. Data centers don't create many jobs at all, and you could argue through second and third order effects that they are job destroyers.

Data centers simply don't require very many people to operate.