ML-Implode News - Cloud Computing Brings Sprawling Centers, but Few Jobs, to Small Towns

The companies come to places like Boydton for basics like land, water and electricity. Even with low local wages, people are a high-cost item. As small as the staffs at these mammoth facilities are, companies say, perhaps a third of the company jobs will eventually be filled by robots.
Google started building in eastern Oregon to be near cheap hydroelectric power on the Columbia River, and most recently it has focused on Iowa, Alabama and Tennessee. Microsoft has a center in Wyoming, and it bought a nine-hole golf course as part of a complex near West Des Moines, Iowa. Amazon recently built similar giant facilities on the outer reaches of Columbus, Ohio, and Dulles, Va.

"A lot of this stuff is put in rural parts of the country that used to be part of a manufacturing economy" that has gone overseas, said Bill Coughran, a partner at the venture investment firm Sequoia Capital who ran much of Google's big engineering for eight years. "Textiles and furniture created a big power grid in the south. Then those jobs went away."
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Microsoft did not dispute reports that it would spend $1.1 billion on the Boydton data center, and said that "on average, data centers employ tens to several dozen people," in a mixture of corporate and contracted positions. It declined to let a reporter tour the site.

"They talked about 100 jobs, but it's a slow process," said Thomas C. Coleman III, the mayor of Boydton. So far, he says, the biggest impact "has been a couple of lunch tables at the Triangle gas station."... Microsoft initially came to a couple of town meetings, and it seemed to offer a way Boydton could come back. "Now they're off by themselves," she said. "We hear they have a really nice Starbucks machine."

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Cloud Computing Brings Sprawling Centers, but Few Jobs, to Small Towns