New Video of Apple's Enormous iDataCenter

1sockchuck writes "A new aerial video provides a rare look at Apple's new data center in North Carolina, which is expected to begin operations as soon as this week. It reveals the scale of the facility, which at 500,000 square feet will be among the world's largest data centers. The video, shot by a North Carolina real estate agent, also shows additional site preparation work that could support rumors that Apple plans to build another huge data center at the site." This is what drone cameras are for.

Comments

Re:What will go in it?

[jcr]

Apple has always been the biggest customer for Xserve. Not sure what they're using now, but when the iTMS store was launched, all of the machines serving the store pages in iTunes were Xserves, with some combination of Sun and IBM systems to run the back-end order processing SAP services.

-jcr

Re:What will go in it?-RDF.

[Pharmboy]

Cheap TVA electricity.

Actually, they are located close to McGuire nuclear power plant (owned by Duke Energy), and near 4 major hydroelectric dams on the Yadkin River that create High Rock Lake, Tuckertown, Badin Lake (Narrows) and Falls lake, which are managed/quazi-owned by Alcoa. Alcoa doesn't make aluminum here anymore, so they have power to sell, and usually do during peak time. There are also a number of coal and natural gas plants nearby. I live about 70 miles from the new data center, and was somewhat surprised that they put it in such a low density area, until I realized how much power capacity is nearby. TVA isn't really a factor in this part of the country, as I believe all the hydro power around here is privately owned.

Electricity usage in NC is way down, due to all the textile and furniture manufacturing moving to China and India, plus all the aluminum manufacturing is now gone. Those industries were typically BIG consumers of electricity. My understanding is that all the power plants in this region are running well below their peak output, so we literally have more than we know what to do with here. I would imagine that electricity is damn cheap for Apple to buy in bulk, which is a major portion of their expenses.

Also, it doesn't hurt that NC is located somewhat in the center of the eastern USA, and 2/3rds of the population lives east of the Mississippi river, so it is actually a good location, geographically. The rather new Dell plant near Winston-Salem was just shut down (moved to Mexico), and there has been rumors of Apple buying it for manufacturing as well. There are lots of good reasons that would make sense, since the state spent MILLIONS in new infrastructure to the plant just a few years ago, and the workforce around here is generally good with a manufacturing history, AND both UPS and FedEx have major hubs about 30 minutes away at GSO. Would love to see that happen, only because we need the jobs with over 10% unemployment here.