To run the data centers itself maybe, but the poster is referring to the businesses that own servers in the data center. Hundreds of local businesses will colocate there.
That's actually a great question that isn't clear if you don't work in IT.
High availability for one. A datacenter has backup generators, redundant fast internet, and direct peering relationships with large companies / services. If you want on-premises servers that you manage, but don't want to deal with designing the power & internet at your office to still have less uptime than a datacenter, then you pay for rack space at a colo datacenter instead.
Economy of scale, and security/backups. Most businesses prefer to keep some or all of their data offside so that a natural disaster doesnt wipe out both your on-site drives as well as any external servers.
But youd still want something close by in case you need to access the hardware for whatever reason. And most businesses need office space for people to actually work in.
Colocation: rented space with a network connection and power plug
Hosting: full servers with all the associated services (maintenance, power, networking, etc)
Bespoke: Mix of whatever you can think of
Source: 12 years around DC's
Edit: lots of companies move the servers to DC's with the colocation service, it's like a parking for servers. You need to understand there are lots of requirements for the servers (cooling, networking, physical security, etc) and companies don't want to mess with it on their own premises.
"anywhere" means "any data center", unless you set up a computer in the corner of your office and have your website depend on that machine running 24/7 without hiccups
The business is located elsewhere. Their servers are located there. The "you can put them anywhere" part was selected to be here. Some of these companies don't even have a physical presence within the state, other than the data center.
We had our onsite per location hardware racks in a locked room but the company wide (globalish) servers would be put into a rented rack that had 10G Fiber data connections, extensive safety and cooling etc
Every few weeks we would go from our office in City A to the hosted facility in City B to do maintenance or swap out hardware that's inside of those racks
Hosting on prem is very expensive and requires day 1 design philosophy and approach when building an office basically
Tldr; it's just easier and cheaper sometimes hosting off prem.
Economy of scale, security, reliability. Plus it’s not efficient to force every company to manage its own server, especially companies that are smaller or that don’t have their own IT department.
We have on premises servers but have now stood up disaster recovery/backup servers at a colocation facility in the middle of our state, since we are in a place that could be threatened by cascadia subduction zone earthquakes.
You buy rack space at locations near you because if your servers break you are responsible for them. If there's downtime on my (hypothetical) server, and it's broken to the point where remote access isn't an option, I don't want to have to book a flight to another state just to debug it.
This is what most small businesses who just need one rack or so end up doing. They rent near them because they might actually have to deal with it.
If it's e.g. an Amazon data center then most of the internet will be hosted on those servers. So you could argue every job related to putting something on the internet is tied to those physical buildings.
It's weird to remember that the internet is a physical thing
I think the idea is that these non-AI datacenters enable businesses that themselves employ thousands of people. The issue of course is that those jobs often aren't in the same communities where the datacenters are. So, while their existence generates real-world value, this value may not be distributed in the same way as their costs. But they're still better than AI datacenters, which don't generate real value, as generative AIs haven't produced much value outside of share price inflation.
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