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Curious globally, but mostly interested in USA/UK.
I would like to live a more pastoral life, but anecdotally I've heard that people tend to be very different to those you find in a city.
My guess: You need at least a town with a state college. (Do you consider Fort Collins, Colorado to be "rural"? It's about 110,000 people. Decent tech scene there.)
I used to live in a small rural town West of Lansing when I worked as an agronomist in a past career. I left to do a SaaS startup and stayed local because this small town became a test site for cable Internet. Note this was a time when neither Lansing nor Grand Rapids had a broadband Internet option, everything was dial up or ISDN if you were lucky.
My new office was across from city hall. I advocated to the city father's that they spend a fraction of the money promoting it's empty industrial park (every small town in Michigan has one) to lure software companies to town promoting it's then rare broadband Internet. They treated me as if I was advocating building a spaceport for aliens. In fact if they saw me coming they'd cross the street.
I found out years later that quite by accident a startup had moved to the town specifically for the availability of broadband. Now they only have around 25 employees twenty years later but in a town of less than 3,000 I think that is still pretty good. But with a small amount of effort they could have had a dozen such companies ;<(.
I don’t know any off the top of my head but I am also very interested if there are any existing hubs. I assume it would be somewhere with good internet.
The Center on Rural Innovation (CORI) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization partnering with rural leaders across the country to build digital economies that support scalable entrepreneurship and lead to more tech jobs in rural America.
https://ruralinnovation.us/community-impact/rural-innovation...
Not affiliated, just found it prompted by your question, looks very interesting!