We knew that Apple was building a pair of new data centers close to Facebook's operation in Prineville, Oregon. But we didn't realize just how close they were until we sent a plane over Oregonian high desert.
The notoriously secretive Apple is especially secretive about its data centers. So while Google and Facebook have opened up their doors to Wired reporters over the past year, Apple has not only rolled up the welcome mat. They've disconnected the front doorbell.
That's what forced us to take to the skies. In April, we published our first overhead shots of Apple's Maiden, North Carolina, data center, and a few weeks ago, we sent our iSpy plane over Prineville, where Apple has just broken ground on a $68 million data center, just down the road from Facebook.
So here's the world's first look at the future home of the West Coast iCloud:
You can see Apple's mini data center -- they call it a tactical data center -- up in the northeast corner of the property. Here's a close-up shot:
Apple finished this building earlier this year, but just south of it, you can see what will be the site of its much larger 338,000-square-foot data center. Apple wants to eventually build two of these monster data centers on the 160-acre site, but right now, there's no sign of the second facility.
When it goes fully online, Prineville will be fully powered by alternative energy. That might help cut it some slack from Greenpeace, which has been known to launch unexpected protests on Apple property armed with window-washers and black balloons.
Apple showed up in Prineville only after Facebook had built its own 330,000-square-foot data center just outside of town. The internet giants love locations like this, primarily because of their cheap real estate, local tax breaks, cool climates, and reliable and abundant power supplies.
Facebook's first data center was up and running a year ago. The company is now putting the finishing touches on a second data center (at the bottom of the photo below) and has also broken ground on a new cold-storage facility, which is designed to save power by icing backup data on servers that are only rarely switched on. That smoothed-out rectangular patch just beneath the second data center is the future site of cold storage:
Apple operates three other data centers: in Newark, California; in Maiden, North Carolina; and at the company's Cupertino headquarters. Earlier this year, it started work on a fifth facility in Reno, Nevada.
