Even if the datacenter does hire some local labor for construction, that's still all temporary jobs. It's not an ongoing source of employment for locals.

sure, that only covers construction though. Once the thing is built they are going to travel in all the maintenance that needs to happen, and that local tradesman is not going to get to many new home construction jobs after it goes in. Who wants to live nearby a noise polluter like that?

I would imagine there aren't too many electricians in Yeehaw, Minnesota, trained and qualified to do gigawatt data center installs. So they'll freight in contractors to do that work, and maybe temporarily employ a few locals for a month or two for auxiliary stuff.

More generally, this is the universal playbook when someone wants to dump some megaproject on a community that doesn't want it: This will create X jobs and inject $Y into the local economy. Can you name one case where this actually happened? It's usually very few additional permanent jobs and, particularly for public-works stuff, millions or even billions in extra debt to pay off. But don't worry, this next thing we're working on once we get the local council to issue a permit to bulldoze your forest park, that will bring in jobs, we promise.

Because the "it'll create X jobs" implies it's ongoing. It's a disingenuous attempt to oversell the benefits because they know if they're transparent about it, suddenly it doesn't seem like such a great deal.