I thought that's what their DCs were for. It definitely seems a bit out of character for a company that designs its own silicon to outsource something so comparatively trivial.
It gives Apple flexibility and avoids secondary technical and real estate type debts.
It makes sense for Amazon, Google, and Microsoft to build out datacenters because they're both using them for their core business and selling compute and storage resources to third-parties.
Unless Apple intends to get into the cloud computing business, eating the cost of tooling up a datacenter puts a big construction and maintenance cost on the "Liabilities" side of the T-sheet that they can avoid via a smaller rental cost.
Now, if I had a fleet of cars, the calculus may change on that.
Owning and operating a datacenter is a whole kettle of fish that they don't want to get into if they don't need to. The real estate taxes (wherever they set it up) will matter, but the larger costs are likely to be in day-to-day operation, upgrading and maintaining hardware (and the entire process for that), dealing with actual natural disasters like a flood (or a bird flying into a transformer house and blowing power to N% of the datacenter, which means they need a backup generator, which means they need to test and maintain the backup generator, etc., etc.).
There's definitely a break-point where it's cheaper to pay someone else (in Apple's case, multiple someone-else's) to deal with that hassle.
We are in a construction boom nationally and it's currently difficult to get enough people to construct DCs. The ability to scale out is limited by construction.
Apple is building DCs, they are late to the game, but they probably can't scale their infra fast enough and need to use cloud services as a way to keep scaling without impacting their customers.
That definitely depends on where and which kind of data center. If you're willing to take a derelict warehouse and put in containers like Google did, all you need to do is providing power and fiber (which should be plenty in any industrial settings) and you're set in a matter of weeks to months.
If you're aiming higher, as in design a DC, buy the ground, build the building itself and then installing all the stuff needed, you're in for much more money and time. Depending on the local politics and laws as well as power/fiber infrastructure, you can cut some corners but the worst-case (uncooperating politicians that need to be brought in line by the courts, the next 110kV transformer being at capacity, no fiber and no empty tubes in the ground which means digging yourself) is the benchmark there.
So you essentially trade off time to market for PUE.
In a large compute region the higher PUE of the shipping container approach is going to limit how many servers you can put in that location because power to a particular site is often a limiting factor. Also not everywhere do you have access to water from the Columbia river.
They will mostly likely work with the local utility to build an entire substation for the DC, so they won't have to deal with sharing capacity on an existing sub's XFMR.
The tenant dictates the location and design, but DFT builds and runs it. 15 years ago, everyone large wanted into the datacenter game. Then they realized it sucks to own a lot of land all over and employing mainly security guards and janitors there isn't worth it. Wholesale DC to the rescue.
And yeah, I know that Digital Realty bought Dupont.
Yeah, no. With very few exceptions FB builds and owns their own datacenters. Basically, anything you read about in the news is entirely self-owned and operated. Yes, even employing security guards. E.g. this http://money.cnn.com/2017/08/15/technology/facebook-ohio-dat...
They also buy on the wholesale market taking over entire buildings and campuses. DFT had a great business model. Leasing out entire campuses to hyperscale players on 30 year leases before even breaking ground. Pre-determined interest rates means you know exactly how much you can charge per CRSF and make a good living. Honestly, I was pretty pissed when DRT bought DFT.
FB and et al do still build their own DC's. Especially where municipalities drop their pants and offer huge tax breaks. But there's still a tremendous amount of "single tenant" purchasing done at the wholesale level by the hyperscale players.
I guess my point is that even at the top tier, people value flexibility.
There are plenty of datacenter-owning real estate investment trusts that build huge facilities expressly for the purpose of turning around and immediately subleasing space to large third parties. With facilities that are already built and online this can reduce your 3-year timespan to a couple of months from contract execution to thousands of live servers, if the people doing the contracts and technical specs are sharp.
For a company the size of Apple, if they do have intentions to 100% own their datacenters, this sort of thing would be a stopgap solution. But it's a possibility.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-09/digital-r...
Looking at BackBlaze's posts about designing rack-mounted dense storage units and their reliability tests is very informative on how specialized it really can be.
This is a swag, but I imagine more content is stored on Dropbox than iCloud, potentially lowering the savings even more.
https://www.infoq.com/news/2015/05/mesos-powers-apple-siri
I was at mesoscon a few (several?) years ago when they announced it and gave a talk regarding the tech side of things.