That’s Apple’s New Data Center? Where’s the Giant Glass Cube?

When plans for it were first announced, Apple’s North Carolina data center was described as “as big as they come” and in more colloquial parlance, as “big-assed.” And that is truly the case, as this brief aerial video posted to YouTube demonstrates.

The facility, which is nearly five times the size of Apple’s giant data center in Newark, Calif., isn’t exactly pretty, but as far as efforts to house 500,000 square feet of data center space in a single building go, it’s pretty impressive. And it does have a bit of Area 51 about it, particularly since Apple (AAPL) hasn’t yet revealed its true purpose. That said, it’s most likely related to some infrastructure-intensive cloud-computing initiative.