The companies actually buy a lot of equipment and supplies locally, and use local construction crews where possible (if there's enough of them available in the area).

One of the things that people are annoyed about with data centers is that even if the company does buy things locally, they often get exempted from sales tax. For example, Texas and Ohio exempt data center equipment purchases from sales tax, and Meta negotiated a 20-year exemption from sales tax for their big Hyperion campus in Louisiana.

Probably taxes, land taxes, local employees, bribes to the local government, etc.

Modern water cooling systems can be closed loop, but that's more expensive, particularly at the scales datacenters use. So, evaporative open-loop cooling it is!

if you make them use closed-loop systems through regulation, they would make less profit, and we can't have that!