Apple Building $1 Billion Server Farm in North Carolina?
Apple Insider picked up a story from The Charlotte Observer that involved a lot of stuff about tax breaks and revitalizing certain counties, but we have to confess, all we really saw was:
Apple building $1 Billion Server Farm
Yeah, that's like 1 dollar for every app download. Which made us wonder, is this building out and diversifying the location of infrastructure to help support the growth of existing "cloud-based" services like iTunes (including the App Store) and MobileMe, or does Apple have yet more on the agenda?
iTunes and MobileMe took a pounding when Apple released iPhone 2.0 last year. Turning on Push Notification for millions of users this year, never mind pie-in-the-sky future rumors of adding on-device movie and TV downloads for the iPhone will no doubt require the phatest of pipes. Could this also be just the beginning of Apple's server farm planting as well? Or is it just a much-less-exciting redundant off-site mirror for current Cupertino based systems?
Editor-in-Chief of iMore, Executive Producer at Mobile Nations, co-host of Iterate and ZEN and TECH, cook, grappler, photon wrangler.
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There has been speculation about this for a few weeks since it surfaced in our State Senate a few weeks ago. I'll be honest I don't think that anyone thought it could be Apple. Based on the way the law was written it does seem possible. Nice to have them in the state but as a taxpayer I'm not seeing the payoff.
Other sites have hints that this might be for some government service contract for the US.
But there is also speculation that the entire installation would cost half as much if it were built out of generic blade servers rather than Apple gear. /smirk
icebike Does't Apple run Sun gear for MobileMe already?