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Notes -
Contrast AI data centers with more traditional industry, say a car factory (perhaps from 20 or 30 years ago).
Per million dollars invested, the car factory created tremendously more local economic activity. I imagine they might have multiple full-time jobs per million dollars, welders and mechanics and office workers who would in turn go to cinemas and super markets and so forth.
In AI, 1M$ buys you perhaps 25 H200 GPUs. They probably fit within a single 2m rack. You install that rack, along with thousand similar ones, and send a technician to replace failing fans. I don't think that this is the price segment where you care about saving a few dollars on fans, so it seems entirely plausible that your 1M$ investment will never require a technician during its economic lifetime. Sure, there is some overhead, like power supply and cooling, but this likewise is stuff which can be made reliably if you are willing to spend big bucks on it.
The intellectual labor of running the data center (to the degree that it still involves humans) is not local at all. The nerds sit in SV and do not spend a dime in the local economy.
For a community, the liability of an industry is proportional to the investment. Permitting someone to build a small theme park for a few million dollars is a limited risk, at worst the town can cough up the costs and shut it down. With a billion dollar investment, things look different. Once that data center is built, it will run, come hell or high water (though paperclips or the bubble bursting might still cause it to be shut down), because the investors have billions on the line and will be sure to phrase the contract in such a way that whomever is running on a "cancel the datacenter" platform will not be able to do so.
If the datacenter offered a thousand local jobs, that might still be worth it. But it does not, it offers a handful of jobs -- plus some temporary economic surplus while it is being built.
Furthermore, the locals likely have an acute awareness of how likely their elected representatives are to actually make a great deal instead of a complete blunder.
From their perspective, it may be fairly described as a Faustian pact -- you do not know that the demon is going to fuck you over, but you know very well that he is much smarter than you are and does not have any straightforward incentive not to fuck you over, so you do the math and decide that you will pass.
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