Apple wants to buy more land for Oregon data center
Apple is considering purchasing another 96 acres of land in Prineville, Ore., in hopes of expanding its data centers even further, The Oregonian reports. The assistant planning director for Crook County confirmed to the paper that a company code-named "Project Pillar" has expressed interest in buying the land -- and The Oregonian believes that "Project Pillar" is indeed Apple:
The property awaiting transfer is covered by the same tax break agreement that Apple now operates under. And [Phil] Stenbeck said Pillar previously went by the code name Maverick -- that's the name Apple used last year when it paid US$5.6 million to buy 160 acres of Crook County land for its first Prineville data center...
This time last year, Apple began construction of a 338,000-square-foot data center on the bluffs above Prineville, just down the highway from a similar facility owned by Facebook. Plans filed with Prineville show Apple contemplates a second data center of the same size -- 65 percent larger than the biggest Costco -- on the property it already owns.
If Apple were to acquire the property, it would no doubt be used for data centers to power its ever-expanding selection of cloud services, including the iTunes Store, the company's App Stores, its mapping services and iCloud.
