iCloud is coming down to earth in Apple's newest data center (nearest neighbor: Facebook)

Apple is finally breaking earth in Prineville, Oregon on the 160-acre data center site the company purchased back in February — not too far from Facebook’s Prineville data center.

Almost immediately after purchasing the land, Apple put a small modular center on the site. Eventually, the company plans to have two massive data centers totaling over half a million square feet onsite. When complete, the  facility will join existing data centers in Newark (California), North Carolina, a planned data center in Nevada, and another in Hong Kong.

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With over 400 million iOS devices sold, many of them sharing, synchronizing, and backing up data via iCloud, Apple has an ever-increasing data management challenge. Not to mention iTunes’ movie and song purchases, and billions of app store downloads.

The initial cost of the development is just $68 million, but if Apple builds out both buildings, costs will run into the hundreds of millions of dollars, and perhaps as high as a billion (which is what Apple is planning to spend on its Nevada data center).

Prineville, a little town of just 10,000 inhabitants, must be having quite the construction boom. Facebook is hard at work in Prineville too — expanding its existing data centers to eventually reach a total of almost 700,000 square feet.

While Apple has never allowed photos inside its data centers, Google just released a stunning gallery of images from inside its massive server buildings.

photo credit: Terinea IT Support via photopin cc