Interesting tidbit from John Paczkowski at Digital Daily this morning: according to his sources, Apple is considering doubling the size of the massive data center they’re building in Maiden, North Carolina, thus bringing it to 1 million square feet.
Steve Jobs says the MacBook Air is the future of the MacBook and the future of the notebook as well. But if that’s to be the case, the machine — and Apple’s ecosystem — needs to evolve a bit more to appeal to that strata of user tethered to the high capacity hard drives that the Air has summarily dispatched.
This being Apple we’re talking about, that evolution is likely already well underway and perhaps — perhaps — being engineered at the company’s massive new North Carolina data center. With its 500,000 square feet of data center space (currently, sources tell me that Apple is considering doubling that) that facility has been built for something. And what better use to put it to than the cloud services that might completely eliminate the need for high capacity hard drives and give the Air storage to match its performance characteristics.
The data center is still under construction, but back in July Apple confirmed the facility will be up and running by the end of this year. Whether this new rumor will push the “release date” of the data center to 2011, we don’t know yet. But surely Apple’s is planning big things for its cloud-based future.
Below is a video of the facility as seen in February 2010.
