It really depends on the niche or the industry considered, though: I can happily say that I can do materials informatics from my basement at home now and much faster and better than as a cog in any lab anywhere in the world. Same for a great number of STEM applications, if you ask or follow high-level practitioners through conferences, journals and social media. The elephant in the room is the Intellectual Property generated through STEM applied data science, which is hot and even dangerous as you can see from superstars like OpenAI, DeepMind or politically-motivated aggregations.