Why would they need to be close to 'a large pool of talent' in order to run a bunch of hosting? It doesn't take that many people to run a hosting facility, the ones I'm familiar with are mostly deserted. They take people to set up and a large amount of capital but once that's done it takes very few people to run.

Even the (very large) Google data centers typically do not employ more than 100 people, that's 30 people over 3 shifts and some overhead.