Fortune‘s Philip Elmer-Dewitt first noticed that the facility was missing from Google Earth back in October 2010. The address of the 183-acre land parcel that Apple had purchased the year before showed a real farm instead of a server farm even though video footage of a massive white building at the address had emerged on YouTube.
After the iCloud pre-announcement, Elmer-Dewitt checked the address again on Google Earth — something he says he did two weeks before, only to find green farms. This time the satellite image included Apple’s massive bu ilding, which has little employee parking and a single road leading in and out. As suspected since 2009, it looks a lot like a building that might host an ambitious cloud project like iCloud.
“How was Apple able to keep Google (GOOG) from displaying this particular swath of satellite imagery — imagery provided by the USDA Farm Services Agency? That’s still a mystery,” Elmer-Dewitt writes.
Google has not yet responded to our request for a comment.
Apple’s data center in Maiden, NC, as shown on Google Earth Wednesday.
More About: apple, Google, google earth
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