With its newest data center in North Carolina, Apple is hoping to get a boost from the sun to power its rapidly growing cloud services. It's also banking on one of the nation's largest fuel-cell installations of its kind in an effort to get completely off the electrical grid.
Having completed a $1-billion, 500,000-sq-ft data center in Maiden, N.C., in late 2011, the computing giant recently began construction on a 20-MW solar farm. Along with a new 5-MW fuel-cell installation, the company plans to use the farm to supply all the energy needed to run the facility.