(NCer here) The big thing in a lot of rural North Carolina is that there was a huge textile processing and paper processing industry that's slowly been losing ground to overseas manufacturing.

The end result is that many of these counties have extremely large power and water production capabilities built up and no one to sell to. The datacenters are attractive because they will actually buy these utilities at much higher capacities than the community would otherwise. This is worth much more than any small number of jobs created.

I don't understand this terribly well, but shouldn't then market forces, the decreased price of power and water in places due to decreased demand cause it to be an attractive place to build a data center regardless? Why then do we need to be subsidizing it?

Quite right, and lot's of places don't. You can ask them how many Datacenters they have.

Seriosuly though, you're right, if nobody offered subsidies, they would all be on a level playing field and market forces would win out. However, it only takes one to break rank and the free market is gone.

We don't -- but when we don't, another county will

This is it, dead on.

The problem is not incentivizing just your old textile/paper-processing county, it's competing with all of the other ones. So at the end of the day hopefully everyone's done their homework and the community is still making more money than it was before.

This actually makes a lot of sense to me (someone from an urban area). I never understood why all these towns in the middle of nowhere USA would offer such generous subsidies but this line of reasoning perfectly justifies it. I suspect the cost to decommission or "right-size" these sorts of facilities would probably cost... on the order of hundreds of millions of dollars.