Apple's Billion-Dollar Data Center Suddenly Appears on Google Earth
As Apple's iCloud announcement nears, the company seems to have allowed Google to show images of its new North Carolina data center on Google Earth.
No, it's not an image from the set of the movie "Deliverance;" it's a Google Earth shot of Apple's giant data center in the boonies of North Carolina. The image was previously unavailable on Google Earth, but as Apple's iCloud announcement nears, the company seems to have allowed Google to show the massive, 500,000-square-foot facility to the world.
Fortune says until now, if you were to look up the data center, located at the intersection of U.S. Route 321 and Startown Road in Maiden, N.C., satellite imagery would disappear just before the construction side. The area west of Startown Road showed "nothing but woods and farmland and a bit of driveway that ended abruptly in the middle of a field" until recently.
On Tuesday, Apple announced that in a keynote address, Steve Jobs will reveal iCloud at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), which kicks off June 6 in San Francisco. Accordingly, the data center meant to support iCloud is presumably located in this billion-dollar facility that has just popped up on Google Earth.
If you're interested in scoping out the data center, you can check it out by entering latitude and longitude points 35.588364 and -81.26235 into Google Earth or by clicking here. However, only aerial images are present, there are no shots of the site available on Google Street View.
More information about Apple's new data center could be reveled in Jobs' keynote next week. It's unclear how the pictures were able to remain secret for so long. Apple about two years ago, but secrecy tends to be part of the way Apple operates, it's not much of surprise that details about the center are scant.