Skilled labor for sure, but not necessarily college educated.
I'm imagining a future where the US builds a Tower of Babel from thousands of data centers just to keep people employed and occupied. Maybe also add in some paperclip factories¹?
Do you mean building the centers or maintenance or both?
Once you have one working design for the environment (e.g. hot desert vs cold and humid), you can stamp the things out with minimal variation between the two.
The maintenance of all of that supporting infrastructure is the standard blue collar work the same.
The only new blue collar job on the maintenance side is responding to hardware issues. What this entails depends on if it’s a colo center and you’re doing “remote hands” for a customer where you’re swapping a PSU, RAM, or whatever. You also install new servers, switches, etc.
As you move up into hyperscalers the logistics vary because some designs make servicing a single server in place not worth cooling the whole hot aisle (Google runs really hot hot aisles that weren’t human friendly). So sometimes you just yank the server and throw it in a cart or wait for the whole rack to fail and pull it then.
Overall though, anything that can be done remotely is. So the data center techs do very little work on the keyboard
It's no different than sports stadiums selling the same idea to local governments:
"We'll create jobs."
"Mostly low quality jobs with poor benefits and minimum wages."
This is no different.
Whenever you hear about job claims you should be asking what quality of jobs?