Apple has been busy building one of the world's largest data centers in Catawba County, North Carolina for some time now. This colossal edifice of silicon, wire and awesomeness is rumored to be the keystone of Apple's future cloud-based computing ventures. Can MobileMe users expect to see more storage space coming their way? Perhaps, if we're lucky, Apple will finally start putting the media-streaming know how they snagged through the purchase of LaLa to work for content-hungry iTunes users. No matter what Cupertino has planned for their massive North Carolina data facility, one thing is certain, it's gonna be big... and stands to get a heck of a lot bigger.
According to All Things D, in addition to the 183 acres of real estate that Apple purchased in Catawba County to build their 500,000 square foot data center on, the company has also bought an additional 70 acre parcel of dirt directly across the road from their new facility resides. What could it mean.
Well, there's two answers to that one, in our opinion: Either nothing or a lot.
If you can afford it (and Apple most certainly can) than you need allows for some wiggle room should you decide to expand a ways down the road. With this in mind, it seems perfectly reasonable for Apple to purchase a few extra acres for later use should they feel the need to expand the scope of their operations in the area. That said, in the company's recent history, Apple has seldom left anything to chance. If you're seeing a product today, chances are, it was planned as part of the company's road map several years ago. With last week's roll out of the new series of MacBook Airs, Steve Jobs proclaimed that we were looking at the future of notebooks. Much of the future, as Apple sees it, relies upon solid state drive technology. That technology, while obviously superior to old school moving-parts drives, is wicked expensive for the time being. It could very well be possible that Apple, foreseeing the success of Flash-based computers, plans on providing a huge amount of cloud-based storage for MacBook toting consumers in order to keep the cost of their hardware relatively low.
So what will it be: Did Apple buy the additional land in order to have room to grow or is it all part of their master plan? Only time will tell how this one is gonna play out.
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