Apple may be close to having its Prineville, iCloud data center up and running, as the company has begun advertising new job listings for engineers to staff the facility.
Apple on Monday published a notice seeking a data center operations planner to be based in Prineville. The listing, discovered by AppleInsider, comes just days after another listing for a Prineville-based position, this one for a data center site services technician. In late March, the company posted yet another position, for a Prineville-based
The jump in Prineville hiring could indicate that Apple is close to bringing its iCloud data center that’s based there online. Apple began construction of the facility in October, clearing and flattening the land where the two 338,000 square-foot buildings would eventually stand.
Land preparation and construction are thought to have cost Apple around $68 million. Including server hardware, construction costs, and labor costs, the facility is expected to cost in the hundreds of millions, and perhaps billions, of dollars.
As with Apple’s other data centers, the Prineville facility will be 100 percent renewable energy-powered. Locally sourced wind, hydroelectric, and solar power will go into making the iCloud facility run.
iCloud, Apple’s cloud media service for iOS and Mac OS devices, is the most popular cloud storage option in the
The new facility is expected to take on some of the iCloud load that Apple currently routes through its servers in Maiden,