The Mystery Of The Disappearing Apple Data Center

Back in 2009, Apple (News - Alert) Inc. told the world that it had plans to build an enormous – 500,000-square-foot – data center to “green” standards in the middle of farmland in Maiden, North Carolina. In the autumn of 2010, curious news organizations and private citizens with helicopters investigated the property, finding an enormous, partially finished building.

So where's the mystery? At the time that journalists and private citizens were submitting photos of the facility under construction, the building failed to appear on Google (News - Alert) Earth satellite imagery. It was as if the building existed at ground level, from not from satellite view. It wasn't until Apple made an announcement about its new cloud-based service offering, iCloud, that its new green data center suddenly began appearing on Google Earth.

It was Fortune journalist Philip Elmer-Dewitt who noticed that the facility was missing from Google Earth back in October 2010, reports Mashable. The address of the 183-acre land parcel Apple had purchased the year before showed a real farm (instead of a server farm) in the place of the giant building – at the same time that video footage of the massive data center could be found on YouTube (News - Alert).

After Apple's iCloud announcement, Elmer-Dewitt again checked the address again on Google Earth – only to find that Apple's facility had suddenly “popped up.” (It hadn't been there just two weeks prior.) As suspected since 2009 by the Wall Street Journal, it looks a lot like a building that might host an ambitious cloud project like iCloud, writes Mashable.

“How was Apple able to keep Google (GOOG) from displaying this particular swath of satellite imagery – imagery provided by the USDA Farm Services Agency? That’s still a mystery,” Elmer-Dewitt writes.

In the interim from the time Mashable published their story, a Google spokesperson explained the mystery. Apparently, Google recently updated aerial imagery in Lenoir, NC. While a photo dated 4/10/2010 with no data center in it appears in the image timeline for the address in question, only half of that photo was actually taken then. The other half, which would contain the data center had it been taken on 4/10/2010, was actually taken on 5/30/09.

Mystery solved. Sort of.

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