(Image courtesy of Cult of Mac)
While Apple has had little to say so far about the new data center they’re building in North Carolina, a new search of county records there shows that Cupertino paid a pretty penny to obtain a one-acre site near the facility.
AppleInsider is reporting that county records recently obtained by Bloomberg reveal that Apple paid as much as a cool $1.7 million to owners Donnie and Kathy Fulbright for their one-acre spread near Maiden, North Carolina where the company is currently putting the finishing touches on a new East Coast data center.
“They told us to put a price on it and we did,” Kathy Fulbright told Bloomberg, noting that it took several offers from Apple for her family to finally relent on moving. The couple originally purchased the land for a mere $6,000 and lived there over 30 years, but took their Cupertino flash money and purchased a 49-acre plot of land with a 4,200 square foot house with a Jacuzzi, according to the report.
The generally tight-lipped Apple has had little to say about the new facility, while rumors have run rampant about the potential uses for it, including a huge video streaming pipeline and maybe a beefed-up (and potentially free) MobileMe service. In an earnings call back in July, Apple’s chief financial officer Peter Oppenheimer relayed to investors that the data canter was “on schedule” and expected to be completed “by the end of the calendar year” after being first announced in June, 2009.
“Apple’s growth has been pretty dramatic and they have probably exceeded their capacity,” notes Gartner chief of research David Cappuccio. “Between iTunes and the video store they are going to have, you’re talking about massive amounts of data and millions of people trying to access that at the same time.”
The $1 billion data center in North Carolina has been codenamed “Project Dolphin” by local government officials, expected to directly provide jobs for 50 people as well as generate 250 auxiliary jobs and potentially another 3,000 jobs for the local area. Apple received some substantial tax breaks by building the data center in an “economically-distressed area” -- Catawba County has an unemployment rate of 12.3 percent as of August, versus North Carolina’s statewide unemployment rate of 9.7 percent.
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