One thing that helps to drive this is the amount of support staff that can be available remotely. I work in a company with a large on-site data center, but I haven’t actually been in the data center for several years, even though it is located less then 50 feet from where I sit. There are people that have to be able to go into the data center to physically manipulate hardware, but a large part of the support comes from people that don’t really need to be anywhere near the data center. We have other large data centers that I help support, and I haven’t even visited those sites.

The smaller that size of the staff that has to be physically present, the easier it is to locate in a remote area with a relatively small population, provided it has the power and communications infrastructure. There is probably no reason why a data center with several thousand servers couldn’t be handled by 50 people or less on-site, and the rest of the workers connecting remotely.

The down side of this for a small town is that they may provide fewer jobs than a large call center that has seats for 1,000 representatives, and can provide employment for less skilled people. That data center in Iowa may create a lot of jobs, but it could be for people living in New York, Toronto, San Diego, Manila, or Mumbai.