North Carolina hopes for $1 billion Apple investment
Update at 8:25 a.m. PDT: Further attribution has been added.
North Carolina officials are pushing to change state tax law in hopes of attracting new companies, specifically Apple, according to an Associated Press report.
The state is pursuing a $1 billion investment from Apple over a nine-year period to build a server farm, the AP said, citing an anonymous state official. However, the law must be changed to give state officials the ability to attract Apple through tax breaks and other incentives.
The tax breaks offered to Apple would be worth an estimated $46 million over the life of the deal, the AP reported. But Apple must jump a few hurdles itself. The company would have to meet its $1 billion investment target in order to get the tax breaks, the AP said. Apple would also have to locate the server farm in an area of the state with high unemployment--Catawba and Cleveland counties are said to be potential sites for investment.
Offering tax incentives is not a new practice for any state government, but North Carolina does have experience in attracting high-tech companies. Google signed a deal in 2007 worth $600 million to open a server farm in the state for a promised $260 million worth of incentives over 30 years, the AP reported.
The proposed tax changes that could potentially bring Apple to North Carolina are scheduled for a vote Tuesday.
Jim Dalrymple has followed Apple and the Mac industry for the last 15 years, first as part of MacCentral and then in various positions at Macworld. Jim also writes about the professional audio market, examining the best ways to record music using a Macintosh. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. He currently runs The Loop. You can follow him on Twitter @jdalrymple. 
I'll look into the cooling issue in space.
" It's just stupid and inefficient"
Interesting that you would consider sending a manned rocket to an orbiting platform to replace a failed server / hard drive / etc to be a more effecient use of resources.
In order to really be efficient, you'd need hundreds if not *thousands* of redundant servers to make up for the ones that go down due to hardware failure (memory, HDD, sys bd, etc). Since you can't afford to send up a manned mission to replace parts all the time, you'd either have to have redundancy to the extreme, or have a manned space station for the purpose, either of which becomes hideously expensive to do.
http://www.catawbacountync.gov/
just this year is finally performing building inspections throughout the entire county, woot!
Was there a particular purpose for this server farm? Did some business need the computing space? Some science group need to work on the human genome? The way this article is worded, it smells too much like "build it, and they will come," to me.
Also, I'm a little curious on how exactly NC changed their tax laws in this pursuit. Did they waive some of the locality's taxes a point of sale for the land, and local sales tax, or was it a much better, sweeping revision to their tax code such as no income tax or no corporation tax or the like?
Is it just me, or is CNET lagging behind on reporting details?
The changes in NC tax law are that Apple would not need to pay corporate income tax in NC as long as most of Apples sales are not in NC (Gross simplification).
Not too hot up there most of the year.
:)
- by n7565j May 26, 2009 2:32 PM PDT
- Got a Google server farm here in Caldwell county, they said they came here because of the abundant power here... Since all our furniture plants went to China, I guess we've got some to spare. Catawba and Cleveland are the same way, lots of power, and no users. I don't think they'll hire many locals, maybe a few to maintain the HVAC units & security, but a few is better than none ;-) We got Google, Epic, Red Hat, & RTP to name a few, so keep em comin :-)
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- by Seaspray0 May 26, 2009 4:15 PM PDT
- Please open up the furniture plants. That stuff made in china is cheaper but it doesn't last like the stuff you guys made.
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