Winston-Salem-based DataChambers announced Wednesday that it has acquired a 50,000-square-foot data center in Raleigh.

The company paid $4.7 million for the property on Garner Station Boulevard south of downtown, according to Wake County property records.

The eight-acre site was formerly occupied by Qwest Communications.

DataChambers plans to offer a range of IT services at the facility, including cloud-based services, data backup and business recovery services.

DataChambers also operates a 140,000-square-foot facility in the Salem Business Park in Winston-Salem.

It is a subsidiary of High Point-based North State Communications, which announced a deal to acquire DataChambers in December.

Gov. Bev Perdue said Monday that Facebook is expanding its data center in Forest City. The governor will be touring the site this afternoon.

Facebook announced the $450 million data center last winter and said at the time that it might expand depending on business needs.

The first data center is expected to open in 2012 at the site, southeast of Asheville.
More there 30 people work at the site full-time and the company plans to add 10 more as part of its expansion, according to the governor's office.

Data centers typically are not large employers — though the construction of the buildings have created several hundred jobs.

In announcing the expansion, Perdue's office said that more than 1,500 people have worked on the site so far.

“We believe the expanding operations and continued construction activities will have a positive impact on Rutherford County’s economy,” George Henry, Facebook Data Center Manager, said in a statement.

Western North Carolina is also home to Google's $600 million data center and Apple's $1 billion data center.
 

The Environmental Protection Agency in Research Triangle Park reassured employees today that it is not shutting down its giant data center here, as had been suggested in this blog and announced by the White House and Office of Management and Budget.

The White House said it's shutting down 800 duplicative data centers by 2015 in a bid to shave $3 billion from the federal budget. The announcement lauded government efforts to root out waste.

Several of the targeted centers were listed as being located at 109 Alexander Drive, the address for EPA's RTP complex. That listing triggered an employee panic at the RTP campus, which is the agency's biggest office outside its Washington headquarters.

The White House today said it would shut down 800 federal data centers by 2015, including one in Research Triangle Park next year.

The move is part of a White House campaign to cut government waste but shuttering what the President's staff has identified as "duplicative" data centers.

Data centers are used for storing and managing government data, including hardware and other equipment such as air conditioners and security devices.

The RTP data center is located at the Environmental Protection Agency complex. It was not immediately clear how many people work at the center.

Apple said today that its recently completed data center in Maiden will be one of three centers used to offer its new cloud service.

The service, called iCloud, will allow users to store the content on their Apple devices remotely and wirelessly access it from anywhere on multiple devices.

The Maiden facility, about 40 miles northwest of Charlotte in Catawba County, was specifically built to handle the data storage demands that are expected to be created by iCloud.

The service will be available this fall for free.

Any music purchased through Apple's iTunes service will be accessible through iCloud.

Apple also plans to offer an iTunes Match service for $24.99 a year that will allow user's to access other songs in their iTunes library from the cloud.

The announcements over the last week by Facebook and Infocrossing are further proof that the state's efforts to lure more data center projects to North Carolina appear to be working.

A key part of that effort is a bill passed by state lawmakers this summer that gives tax breaks to companies building large data centers in the state. 

The law grants an exemption for taxes on electricity and business property if a company invests at least $250 million for land and construction over five years.

Figuring out how much Facebook -- or any other company investing more than $250 million -- will benefit from the bill is tricky because not all of the social networking site's $450 million investment will qualify for the exemption.

But the state's Fiscal Research Division did put out a report estimating that the total cost of the bill would be $31.6 million over the next five years.

Infocrossing, a U.S. subsidiary of one of India's largest software companies, plans to open a data center in western North Carolina.

It will join similar facilities open or coming soon from Apple, Google and Facebook, creating a corridor of data centers near Charlotte and adding to the state's reputation as a new hub of the high-tech economy.

The companies are racing to build storage to handle vast amounts of digital data. They're drawn to this state by tax breaks and other incentives, and the region's cheap electricity.

Infocrossing is owned by Wipro, a Bangalore-based conglomerate sometimes known by its nickname, the Microsoft of India.

North Carolina officials are falling over themselves today to brag about their new friend: Facebook.

The social-networking site plans to build a $450 million data center in western North Carolina, joining similar facilities open or coming soon from Google and Apple.

Facebook executives joined state and local officials in announcing the project this morning in Rutherford County, about 65 miles west of Charlotte. The offices of Gov. Bev Perdue and U.S. Sen. Kay Hagan sent out press releases within minutes. Perdue sent out a tweet at 11:55 a.m.

Facebook is receiving $1.4 million in incentives from Rutherford County.

The company is also getting an economic development grant from the county that could be worth $10 million if Facebook meets investment goals.

The project won't be a big job engine. The facility is expected to eventually employ 42 people and must pay more than $13.45 an hour, the Rutherford County average. But it reinforces the state's reputation as a new hub for the high-tech economy.

In July, North Carolina lawmakers approved a new package of economic incentives, including one aimed at attracting more data centers to the state.

The bill passed partly because officials were hoping to lure Microsoft, which was looking for a spot to build a massive data center.

But late last month, Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell announced that Microsoft will invest up to $499 million to locate the data center in Southern Virginia. The project will only create about 50 new jobs, but still represents economic bragging rights for the state. In choosing Virginia's Mecklenburg County, on the North Carolina border, Microsoft rejected sites in Texas, and in North Carolina's Cleveland and Alamance counties.

American Express, which has determined that Greensboro is the best location for the financial services firm's new data center, will not pursue any local or state incentives as part of the project.

Dan Lynch, president of the Greensboro Economic Development Alliance, said in an e-mail that he could provide no other details about the project other than that American Express' site analysis had concluded that Greensboro is the best location and that incentives weren't on the table.

American Express officials declined to comment, but late yesterday Gov. Beverly Perdue issued a statement praising the company's decision.

"I spoke recently to the American Express CEO, during the company’s final decision-making process, and emphasized North Carolina’s outstanding workforce and business-friendly environment," Perdue's statement said. "We clearly made a compelling case to land this important project, bolstering our already-strong reputation as an excellent location for data centers, which bring sustainable jobs and significant investment.

American Express has about 2,000 employees in the state and operates a service center in Greensboro.