alt Hacker NewsI work in construction, - data centres included - in Australia.
From my experience you’re mostly right, however it’s more like, in order of priority: power availability, water availability, data availability, land price. Cost to upgrade upstream power transmission dwarfs all other costs.
I’d note that after construction ongoing jobs are minimal. Specific example: $2B aud datacentre will support 30-60 jobs after completion. And probably 50% of those are low skill/income security,cleaning maintenance etc.
> Specific example: $2B aud datacentre will support 30-60 jobs after completion.
But that's not out of the norm for industrial activity. Like how many people do you think are actually working in an LTL hub or a paper mill or a food product factory at a given time? Probably about the same. You can see the parking lots and count cars on Google Earth.
The towns are estatic because compared to something that generates physical emissions or truck traffic data centers are pretty clean and low risk as long as the noise can be controlled.