Following reports in February that Apple purchased roughly 160-acres of land in Prineville, Ore., for $5.6 million, The Oregonian reported today Apple has now started the first $68 million phase of construction. The new land will apparently consist of two 338,000 square-foot buildings behind a 10,000 square-foot modular data center it has already built on the property. The $68 million figure for the first phase of construction covers one of those two buildings, according to plans filed with Crook County and dug up by The Oregonian:
According to the report, the new project is expected to “run in the hundreds of millions or billions of dollars once it’s outfitted with powerful servers to run Apple’s iCloud service.” Apple said previously that the data center would employ dozens of people once opened and hundreds during the construction process.
It also promised the new data cater would run on “100 percent renewable energy.”
