Source: The Verge
As traditional industrial anchors like paper mills close, rural communities are competing to attract hyperscale data center developments. These projects offer substantial tax revenue and construction jobs but require massive infrastructure investments and consume enormous amounts of water and electricity. The shift reorders rural economies around cloud computing infrastructure rather than resource extraction or manufacturing, creating clear winners—towns with fiber access and favorable power rates—and losers without the geography or political capital to land deals. AI and cloud computing infrastructure concentration in specific rural locations will amplify regional inequality without active policy intervention to distribute data center development more broadly.