Apple Officially Selects North Carolina for New $1 Billion Data Center

[deconstruct60]

I'm with mongoos150 on this one. I think Apple is going to offer some new services. Time will tell.

New unannounced services or new services? The notification traffic increase should be factored in as something that is "known" and upcoming.

Think about it. If every iPhone on the planet is swapping a couple of bytes every minute or so, then as the iPhone population goes 10, 20, 30 million then what is on the other side of that? It isn't how many phones are out there now. It is how many phones are out there 5-6 years from now. Don't buy data centers this size every year (or every two or three ) unless you are some kind primary "cloud" provider. For example if Apple got 1-2% of the Indian and Chinese cell phone markets the numbers could explode easily.

 

[mullman]

Forgive me if this has already been covered... but I'm just wondering what makes NC so special for server farms?

God's Country.

 

[Mattie Num Nums]

Unclear whether the money to GM / AIG / etc. is being thown away. The majority of AIG isn't going to die. It was a very small part of AIG that made a colossal screw of of the entire financial market...... not just their own company.

Similarly GM and Chrysler can pay off some of the money loaned. Chrysler did it before. This time it would be a stretch to get all of it back, but it is certainly possible to get a heath fraction of this money back.

If GM and Chrysler collapsed in an uncontrolled fashion the government would be out billions anyway ( pension insurance, unemployment, more medicare parcitpants, etc. ) in addition to more months of market chaos (which leads to decreased tax revenues.


Giving Apple ($20+ billion cash hoard) a tax break is bit like when cities pay for stadiums for professional sports teams. For 50 employees long term ... that's likely a taxpayer give away in the long run. (unless somehow the equipment over the long term gets hit with a local sales tax. There are corporate ways to duck and weave around that though. )

To me giving GM money just for them to go bankrupt is liking giving a crack head one more hit before he goes clean.

Also more jobs will be made from construction. On hand staff at Data Centers are usually pretty minimal since most sites can be managed remotely.

 

[deconstruct60]

$1,000,000,000 ...for a data centre.

What can they be putting in there? How do you spend $1bn? A few hundred million I can see, but a billion?

Maybe they will be the only people to actually pay for a truly massive deployment of XServes

Also, it is $1B over 9 years. That is likely multiple buildings built up over time. So perhaps $300 million now and another $300 million 4 years from now. By then, no one will be counting anymore and they'll still be getting the tax break.

Similarly, if toss the servers every 3 years ( wear, tear, slow ) that is 3 generations of servers. So take a football field of servers and buy them 3 times. Probably will junk/upgrade a good chunk of the network gear too at least once during that period too.

Also, maybe they'll install onsite power generation ( besides the big diesels likely present.) A windmill or an acre of solar cells would be "so green". Or some environment friendly campus landscaping (although these places are suppose to look boring and low profile. )


They don't "have to" spend a $1B in the first year or two. They don't "have to" spend $1B over the nine years either. The "expect to" is vastly different than "have to". If spending $600million would get no tax cut then easy enough to change "expect to" up to a $1billion so you do.

[ Microsoft was expecting to drop $500m into their chicago center.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/05/20/ascent_ch2_datacenter/
The mostly empty building with basic plumbing cost them about $185m
http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/...eport-microsoft-to-buy-chicago-site-for-185m/

$500m is about the going rate for estimates for very large, state of the art places.

Although Facebook slightly less (by renting out of others sites)
http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/05/18/facebook-20-million-a-year-on-data-centers/

]

 

[deconstruct60]

deleted

 

[pohl]

I don't even have a witty comment. Obviously I know where North Carolina is. I was asking because logical Data Center choices servicing North America are usually in Dallas or Chicago because its smack dab in the middle.

Have you ever seen a map of the united states!? The middle would be more like Omaha or Kansas City. Chicago is up by the great lakes, and Dallas is in the southern-most continental state.

 

[deconstruct60]

To me giving GM money just for them to go bankrupt is liking giving a crack head one more hit before he goes clean.

Also more jobs will be made from construction. On hand staff at Data Centers are usually pretty minimal since most sites can be managed remotely.

The money is not so that they can go bankrupt, the money is so that they can come out of bankruptcy.

Construction is only temporary in a long term view. Once a building/bridge is built ... you're done. That is different from producing consumables. Take away the voodoo loans that were handed out over the last decade and people don't flip into new houses every 2-3 years in large numbers. Likewise, after they build it Apple is going to sit in this building for 9-14 years. May build an adjacent building if grow out of this one (if build a large one) but going to be a while.


If the crackhead is committed to going clean then not giving them the money is an unwise move. One the few ways GM could "clean house" though is for them to go through bankruptcy. Agree, they have made a series of dumb decisions. It isn't just GM that would get nuked though if just let them implode. If they imploded suddenly they'd take out another 1,000 other businesses and drop several more million into the unemployment ranks.

GM could have slow fizzed into oblivion if the economy wasn't in chaos and based on a series of "fad of the 1/2 decade"s. There is a stack of bonehead moves buy the last 4 administrations boxed into the number of viable solutions here.

 

[Mattie Num Nums]

Have you ever seen a map of the united states!? The middle would be more like Omaha or Kansas City. Chicago is up by the great lakes, and Dallas is in the southern-most continental state.

Let me restate... Middle Region. Most data centers I have worked with are in Dallas. The company I work for currently its in Houston.

 

[jpine]

They don't have fair wages or health care benefits for Wal-Mart employees?

Cripes! Maybe if the towns welcomed a few more McDonalds' to do business, they would fare better (albeit fatter)?

At least with McDonalds, a lot of mom and pop stores won't go out of business and the town won't have an empty shell of a building when Wal-Mart moves to a new building. I know of a small town in Missouri that has to content with two vacant eyesores. Wal-Mart is now in their 3rd building in a town of 7500.

 

[jpine]

Have you ever seen a map of the united states!? The middle would be more like Omaha or Kansas City. Chicago is up by the great lakes, and Dallas is in the southern-most continental state.

Funny how we do things, geography wise, here in the states. I'm from Missouri and my wife is from Michigan. When she says she is from the midwest, I remind her that there is nothing mid or west about Michigan.

 

[sterlingindigo]

Don't they know that Michigan - which really needs some new employers - has a better climate for apples?

+1 Michigan! Wonder if we even tried.

 

[Mattie Num Nums]

Funny how we do things, geography wise, here in the states. I'm from Missouri and my wife is from Michigan. When she says she is from the midwest, I remind her that there is nothing mid or west about Michigan.

Very true. Plus in IT most major pipelines run through the Dallas or Chicago area.

+1 Michigan! Wonder if we even tried.

It may be an infrastructure issue. Michigan hopefully will be saved once the auto companies recover. The first thing they need to do though is stop those Unions from making it impossible for the US to compete with overseas entities.

 

[sterlingindigo]

The first thing they need to do though is stop those Unions from making it impossible for the US to compete with overseas entities.

Amen to that. I expect the Unions will expand their overseas business though.

 

[AtlasBoy]

New unannounced services or new services? The notification traffic increase should be factored in as something that is "known" and upcoming.

Think about it. If every iPhone on the planet is swapping a couple of bytes every minute or so, then as the iPhone population goes 10, 20, 30 million then what is on the other side of that? It isn't how many phones are out there now. It is how many phones are out there 5-6 years from now. Don't buy data centers this size every year (or every two or three ) unless you are some kind primary "cloud" provider. For example if Apple got 1-2% of the Indian and Chinese cell phone markets the numbers could explode easily.

New Unannounced.

 

[AtlasBoy]

$1,000,000,000 ...for a data centre.

What can they be putting in there? How do you spend $1bn? A few hundred million I can see, but a billion?

Maybe they will be the only people to actually pay for a truly massive deployment of XServes

Depending on what they use it for, it might not be xserves.

 

[w0by]

North Carolina

North Carolina? Uhhhh, what, are they going to build this in a Krispy Kreme Donut shop or Pepsi center?!?!?!?

 

[deconstruct60]

New Unannounced.

We'll see. It would make alot of sense for Apple to move their primary data center out of the Bay Area ( especially since the Hayward fault is at 50% probably of letting go of a huge one and going higher every year. Frankly, the East Bay (where at least one of their centers is) is historically living on "borrowed time". ).

Just moving their whole operations to somewhere else would be huge and result in nothing substantively new from the external perspective. Likewise as I previously pointed out just rolling what they have out to 10x as many users also isn't "new" but would consume much more horsepower. [ Lowering mobile/idisk down to more competitve pricing they could substantively increase the number of users. ]

Similarly, they could be building a bigger data warehouse ( in order to make more money off of the customers they already have and are increasing by several million per year....) again, as an external consumer of services, don't see anything new.

Something "new" that requires super large would be another major cloud ( ala Amazon AC2) or a communication network ( Applewave flavor of Googlewave ) or search (needing to scan and index the whole internet .... doubtful).

"Mac in the cloud" , not sure mainstream folks are there yet or ever will be if seriously think through the security problems. However, the more inexpensive access terminal that would require drives contrary to what they have done. They are barely happy selling Mac minis.


I'm sure there will be a corner of the data center that will run their backend busines software (SAP / Oracle / etc. ), but that is no where near a large building size.

 

[celtikmind]

$1,000,000,000 ...for a data centre.

What can they be putting in there? How do you spend $1bn? A few hundred million I can see, but a billion?

Maybe they will be the only people to actually pay for a truly massive deployment of XServes

Guess they figured their market share in the server market isn't increasing equally fast enough... Who says you can't buy your own products?!

 

[bigcat318]

Estimated to be around ~ 250mil construction job. So not quite the size of the Microsoft one posted earlier.

 

[kdarling]

Forgive me if this has already been covered... but I'm just wondering what makes NC so special for server farms?

Some people have pointed out that electricity is super cheap in Western NC because of the TVA. No doubt a partial result of all the hydroelectric dams built to power the Oak Ridge Project in WW-II.

North Carolina? Uhhhh, what, are they going to build this in a Krispy Kreme Donut shop or Pepsi center?!?!?!?

Hey, there's a good idea. A combination Apple Store and Krispy Kreme? Talk about huge customer traffic counts!