Apple first announced its intentions in 2017, saying at the time the facility was due to be brought online in 2020.
Apple has launched the first data centre at its new campus in Waukee, Iowa.
The company has confirmed to the Des Moines Register that one data centre building in Waukee is now up and running, supporting North American users of Apple services such as iCloud, the App Store, Apple Music, and iMessage.
The project has been in the pipeline since 2017, and beset by regular delays since.
Apple first announced its intentions in 2017, saying at the time the facility was due to be brought online in 2020.
At some point the project timeline was changed to August 2022, before the company put in a request in 2019 with the Iowa Economic Development Authority to extend the deadline to finish the facility another five years and push the completion date to August 2027.
In April 2021 the tech giant said that the facility had entered the design phase, more than four years after it was first announced and a year after it was originally due to come into operation.
The company finally filed for planning permission for Project Morgan in February 2022, with groundwork actually starting in earnest on the site in the following month.
The facility was first announced as a 400,000 sq ft (37,000 sqm) data center and an investment of $1.3 billion. Filed plans show one 315,773 sq ft (29,300 sqm) data center building on the site on Hickman Road alongside a 63,349 sq ft (5,600 sqm) administration building, a 10,511 sq ft (975 sqm) maintenance building, and three network distribution buildings totaling 2,210 sq ft (200 sqm).
Future data center buildings are planned on the 2,000-acre site – possibly up to five – but will require additional site plan approvals. Assuming similar designs, the campus could total almost 1.9 million sq ft (176,000 sqm) of data center facilities at full build-out.
Apple has seven other data centers currently operating in the US, Denmark, and China.
The company has long been a Google Cloud customer and is believed to be the platform’s single biggest storage customer. In 2019, it was reported that Apple was spending more than $30 million a month on Amazon Web Services.
