Apple is expanding its Internet infrastructure with a new data center in Silicon Valley, as it prepares to bring additional server and storage capacity online later this year, reports “Data Center Knowledge” (http://macte.ch/GHlrU).

The new server space, housed in a third-party facility, will be smaller than the huge data center that Apple has built in North Carolina. The new data center will provide additional IT capacity at a time when Apple is rumored to be developing new cloud computing services delivering streaming media, which could include music, video and file storage, notes “Data Center Knowledge.”

In April, Apple signed a seven-year lease for 2.28 megawatts of critical power load in a new data center being built in Santa Clara, California, by DuPont Fabros Technology (DFT), a eveloper of wholesale data center space, the article adds. The lease is scheduled to commence in the third quarter (July to September), when the building opens.

Apple has built a data center in Catawba County on the outskirts of Maiden, North Carolina. Maiden and Catawba County agreed to US$7.3 million in incentives for Apple in order for them to build the center there. The company constructed a 500,000-square-foot facility along U.S. Highway 321. However, no one knows exactly what the data center will be used for. Apple has reportedly acquired the domain name iCloud.com for use with a new service that would use the North Carolina facility — and, presumably, the one in Santa Clara.

Apple has purportedly bought the domain iCloud.com. Until recently, iCloud.com was a domain name and a storage-as-a-cloud service owned by Linkoping, Sweden-based desktop-as-a-service company, Xcerion.

— Dennis Sellers