Apple revealed during its annual shareholders meeting on Wednesday that the huge data center it has been building in North Carolina will finally come online this spring. The data center, which at 500,000 square feet is five times the size of Apple's current Newark, California data center, will be used to support iTunes and MobileMe services.
Apple has been working towards opening the data center since at least as far back as spring of 2009, when the state legislature of North Carolina passed a bill that provided large tax breaks to companies that made significant investments in the poorest areas of the state. In July 2009, Governor Beverly Perdue signed the bill into law and announced that Apple had chosen the town of Maiden to locate a data center that would cost approximately $1 billion dollars to build and expand within nine years.
Construction and setup proceeded throughout 2010, and Apple said in October last year that it expected the data center to come online "any day now." However, the data center efficiency expert that Apple had hired to design and implement the data center's compute resources—Olivier Sanche—died unexpectedly from a heart attack in November 2010.
Apple hasn't been any more specific about its plans for the facility, which one expert called "big-ass." Given its size (about 3 to 5 times the size of typical large data centers) and its location (rural North Carolina, far from most Internet backbones), it is believed to be geared towards massive cloud services support.
With Apple's acquisition of streaming music service Lala, there was speculation that the new data center could help fuel Web-based streaming access to iTunes content. Recent rumors have also suggested that Apple may launch a revamped MobileMe, adding additional social networking features on top of its e-mail and data syncing services, or it may attempt to offer cloud storage for its iOS-based devices.
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