Apple Building ‘Global Command Center’ at Former Sapphire Plant

Apple has a lot of cash and now it seems that they’re looking to spend some of it. The company announced yesterday that they would be building a $2 Billion ‘Global Command Center’ at the site of the former GT Advanced sapphire plant – the place that went bankrupt when it failed to deliver sapphire screens for iPhones.

This ‘Command Center’ is not going to be a place for Tim Cook to rule the world, but rather a massive data centre, to centralise all of Apple’s online services.

“This multibillion-dollar project is one of the largest investments we’ve ever made, and when completed it will add over 600 engineering and construction jobs to the more than one million jobs Apple has already created in the U.S. Like all Apple data centers, it will be powered by 100 percent renewable energy, much of which will come from a new local solar farm,” Apple said in a statement on the project.”

Despite the company’s massive cash hoard and insane profits, Apple really is quite frugal. While companies like Microsoft and Google acquire big companies all the time, Apple’s last big acquisition, that of Beats headphones, was its largest purchase since 1996 – when Apple bought NeXT, the company that Steve Jobs founded when he was forced out of Apple in 1985.

It’ll be interesting to see what Apple is planning to do with this plant, with some suggesting that it could be part of future plans to increase its online services.

Source: CNBC Via: MacRumors