Cities exist for the agglomeration economies--to enjoy jointly what we cannot enjoy independently. In a modern context, that means highly specialized services. (Between Amazon and Walmart, most specialty goods can be enjoyed largely independent of location). For most Americans, their intersection with specialty services is the medical field (if you are old) or college (if you are young). So if you are looking for something to center a town (or small city) around, it's the same thing existing towns have already centered themselves around--a hospital or a college.

Every other place is grasping to find a place for itself in the 'space of flows', where it adds value to the things being produced. Anyplace that can't manage that is just left with transportation and warehousing, being a link in the larger network. Traditional extractive industries (mining, fishing, forestry, farming) are subsistence at best, vulnerable to global fluctuations to commodity prices (in inputs and outputs), and threatened by every greater mechanization and industry concentration.

Cities revived by leveraging human capital--people adding flows by connecting to people. And that's true of finance or technology. There are a lot of places hoping that 'information' is a new form of capital. (It is, but not the local economic developers want it to be.) A data center isn't a factory--the inputs and outputs of the data center aren't consumed or produced locally. Local power and water are consumed, but the outputs are immediately transported elsewhere for consumption. So there is no chance for a local value add. A data center will never catalyze a local supplier to scale up, nor induce a new local consumer of its outputs.