Apple is set to expand its footprint in North Carolina with a $175 million investment.
As reported by The Morganton News Herald, the company will be adding a 237,600 sq ft (22,074 sqm) data center on land it already owns in Maiden, Catawba County.
The company already has a data center campus in the area, spanning around one million sq ft (92,903 sqm) of space, off of Startown Road.
The campus was built in 2009, and thus far, Apple has invested around $4 billion in developing the site. The campus is fully powered by renewable energy, using biogas fuel cells from Bloom Energy, two 20MW solar arrays, and direct clean-energy purchases. According to the company's 2024 Environment Progress Report, the Maiden site used 453 million kWh, with 82 percent of power sourced from solar and 12 percent from wind.
In 2015, a chemical leak at an Apple data center in Maiden saw five people rushed to the hospital.
No details about construction timelines have been shared. DCD has reached out to Apple and the Catawba Economic Development Corporation for further information.
The company revealed plans to expand its data center presence in North Carolina in February 2025 as part of a wider $500 billion investment plan that included a 250,000 sq ft (23,225 sqm) manufacturing facility to be built in Houston, Texas, data center expansion also in Iowa, Oregon, Arizona, and Nevada, and a “multi-billion dollar commitment” to manufacture chips at TSMC’s Fab 21 facility in Arizona.
Microsoft is currently developing a campus in Catawba County, having announced plans to spend at least $1 billion on four data centers in the area in 2022. One of those projects is located in Maiden, with the company breaking ground in April 2024.
