Apple to beef up its North Carolina megadatacenter – again

Apple has filed plans in Catawba County, North Carolina – where its massive 500,000 square foot data center can be found in the town of Maiden – to add another "tactical data center" to the aforementioned huge installation.

This report comes to us from The Hickory Daily Record of Hickory, North Carolina, a pleasant 15-minute drive down Startown Road from Apple's massive server center.

The filing, the report reports, was for an erosion permit, and describes a modest building of a mere 14,246 square feet. In 2012, Apple added its first tactical data center to the site – a somewhat larger building, at 21,030 square feet.

Apple was originally planning to build two 500,000 square foot data centers on the site, but the president of the Catawba County Economic Development Corporation told the newspaper that "it seems" that companies such as Apple are hesitant to build new large-scale data centers, and are instead opting to build out "in chunks" of smaller installations as needs dictate.

That 21,030 sq ft tactical data center cost $1.8m, but it's not yet known what Apple plans to spend on the new one. Plans do show, however, server racks, 11 air-cooling units, and a "unisex toilet".

Whether that second 500,000 square foot behemoth will ever be built remains unknown, but according to The Hickory Daily Record, "the footprint for one appears to linger." ®