Apple Considering Doubling Size of North Carolina Data Center?

Apple's North Carolina data center under construction in February 2010
In a brief piece outlining some of his thoughts on how the new MacBook Air may play into Apple's strategy for cloud-based media storage, All Things Digital's John Paczkowski notes in passing that he has heard that Apple is already considering doubling the size of its massive North Carolina data center to one million square feet, despite that fact that it hasn't even officially opened yet.

Steve Jobs says the MacBook Air is the future of the MacBook and the future of the notebook as well. But if that's to be the case, the machine - and Apple's ecosystem - needs to evolve a bit more to appeal to that strata of user tethered to the high capacity hard drives that the Air has summarily dispatched.

This being Apple we're talking about, that evolution is likely already well underway and perhaps - perhaps - being engineered at the company's massive new North Carolina data center. With its 500,000 square feet of data center space (currently, sources tell me that Apple is considering doubling that) that facility has been built for something. And what better use to put it to than the cloud services that might completely eliminate the need for high capacity hard drives and give the Air storage to match its performance characteristics.

Apple announced in July that the new facility, which is already five times the size of its existing one in Newark, California, will open by the end of this year, and the company made a hiring push earlier this month signaling that the company appears to still be on track.