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Charlotte Observer is reporting that Apple has begun work building a 174 acre solar farm to power their new Maiden, North Carolina data center. The data center, located in Catawba County, was revealed by Steve Jobs during the iOS 5 keynote at WWDC this year, and will be partly responsible for powering iCloud. It was revealed earlier this year that Apple was purchasing land around the data center. Now we know why.
The solar farm will spread across 171 acres outside of the data center, which originally cost Apple $1 billion to build.
There are no specific details on who exactly will be building the solar farm. For Apple, and many other companies, it has become important to build data centers with clean energy. Google is one of the companies that does this very well, and it looks like Apple is headed that way too.
via GigaOM
