Edible Apple

For the past few months, Apple has been ramping up activity in anticipation of opening up its planned 500,000 square foot data center in North Carolina, one of the largest of its kind in the world. All told, Apple is planning to invest approximately $1 billion into the data center, a dollar amount which easily surpasses the $500 million amount typically poured into similar large scale data centers from companies like Microsoft and Google.

But in purchasing all of the land required to construct the data center, Apple would first have to purchase land owned by Donnie and Kathy Fulbright, who whadya know, weren’t in selling their home of 34 years.

Bloomberg is reporting that the Fulbrights rejected the first two offers from Apple before they finally agreed to sell the land for a whopping $1.7 million, a figure made all the more impressive given that their property consisted of a one story house on less than an acre of land that was originally purchased for $6,000.

“They told us to put a price on it and we did,” said Kathy Fulbright, 62, seated on a brown leather sofa in the living room of the home she and her husband built with the proceeds. The 49-acre property boasts a 4,200-square-foot house with a Jacuzzi in the master bathroom, as well as a manmade pond stocked with bass and catfish.

With the data center due for completion by the end of the year, it remains to be seen just what sort of tricks Apple has up its sleeve. The sheer size of the data center suggests that Apple has something big waiting in the wings, and indeed, there is speculation that it has something to do with cloud computing wherein users could stream purchased content straight to their iOS devices while on the go.