Apple to splash $10bn raisin' American bit barns

Apple has said it will spend $10bn on data centres in the US over the next five years, and will set up a new $1bn campus in Texas.

The iGiant announced the plans for the US expansion today, buttering up the administration with promises of 20,000 new jobs in the country by 2023.

It comes after president Donald Trump criticised the firm for not building in the US, dangling the idea it could pay "zero tax" to ditch Chinese plants.

Apple prices may increase because of the massive Tariffs we may be imposing on China - but there is an easy solution where there would be ZERO tax, and indeed a tax incentive. Make your products in the United States instead of China. Start building new plants now. Exciting! #MAGA

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 8, 2018

The new campus, in North Austin, will be 133 acres and create jobs in engineering, R&D, operations, finance, sales and customer support.

Meanwhile, some $4.5m of the bit barn cash will be spent this year and the next, Apple said.

The firm is already in the process of expanding its data centres in North Carolina, Arizona and Nevada and last year announced it was building a new data centre in Waukee, Iowa, forking out £1.3bn for the work.

Outside the US, the firm is constructing two data centres in Denmark, having decided to build a second in the nation after scrapping plans for an Irish data centre following a drawn-out legal battle with local protesters.

And last year it announced it would set up its first data centre in China, as part of a $1bn investment in the nation's province of Guizhou and in order to comply with new cybersecurity regulations the country had introduced.

Apple makes much of its green credentials; all of its data centres have run on 100 per cent renewable energy since 2013. In contrast, Facebook was still approaching the 50 per cent mark in 2016.

The news of Apple's US expansion came as Microsoft bought up 130 hectares of land in Sweden, paying two municipalities a total of $29.6m for the two plots. It didn't say what it planned to do with them, but it is widely thought the space has been pegged for data centres.

Meanwhile, AWS this week launched a new cloud region in Stockholm, which is its fifth in Europe. The firm now has 60 availability zones in 20 infrastructure regions. ®