Apple has bought a large piece of land in North Carolina, about 10 miles north of its site in the City of Maiden, where it is building a massive data center that will be powered entirely by renewable energy. The company plans to generate more than half of the data center’s energy needs by itself.

Apple paid about US$3m for the property in the City of Conover in a recently closed deal, Hickory Daily Record reported, citing deed documents provided by the county administration. The purchase includes a tract of land measuring about 220 acres and another, much smaller, tract measuring less than half of one acre.

The company is most likely to build a solar array on the Conover site. In May, Apple publicly committed to fully powering its Maiden data center with renewable energy, planning to build two massive solar-energy arrays to provide a part of the electricity.

One of the solar arrays is being built next to the data center itself, while the other one, the company said, would be built “a few miles away”.

Apple expects the data center to need 20MW at full capacity. The two solar arrays and a large fuel-cell installation by Bloom Energy will provide 60% of the load, and the company is planning to buy renewable energy to fill the remaining 40% from commercial suppliers.

Conover is in Catawaba County, and both city and state governments have recently partnered with three other jurisdictions in the region to chip in on a data center park in Conover. No connection between the Apple data center project and what would be called the North Carolina Data Campus has been reported.

They have a $4m loan available from the state to fund installation of infrastructure at a 70-acre property in Conover to make it attractive for data center builds.