Apple has been increasingly interested in powering its operations with that happy old sun, working on a 20-megawatt solar farm coupled with a 5-megawatt fuel cell facility at its data supercenter in Maiden, North Carolina. But that’s not nearly good enough, according to Greenpeace. In fact, the environmental activist group has gone so far as to call Apple out for using “asthma-inducing, climate-destroying coal” which makes the iCloud “the dirtiest thing on the internet.”

Just days after confirming its plans for its data center in North Carolina, Apple has confirmed that it is gearing up to build another one in Prineville, Oregon, neighboring rivals like Amazon, Google, and Facebook. The Cupertino company purchased the 160-acre lot for $5.6 million from Crook County.

25 iPhones worth over $16,000 have been stolen from an Apple Store in Northlake Mall in Charlotte, North Carolina. Unlike the familiar attacks in which thieves smash in Apple’s trademark glass doors, the suspect in this case was an Apple store employee and had easy access to the store’s stock room.

Nestled in Maiden, North Carolina is a 500,000 square-foot data center for Apple’s iCloud services and Siri. The company published its 2012 Environmental Update today with new details about the upcoming solar farm and fuel cell facility that will power the billion dollar data center.

It’s probably good that Apple is in the gadget creation business and not jobs. Turns out, the $1 billion data center the tech giant built down in North Carolina created just 50 full-time local jobs, working out to around $200,000 per spot. Although iCloud and other services likely to come from the site have plenty of tech fans, you won’t find too many “I Love Apple” bumper stickers in a town with double-digit unemployment.

Apple’s massive new solar farm and their next-gen spaceship campus will boost the tech giant’s 2012 expense to $8 billion — a 73% hike over this year, one analyst told investors Monday.

Apple has reportedly begun building a huge solar farm that will provide power to its data center in North Carolina. According to the report, the farm will be built on 171 acres of land, and will be situated right next door to the data center.

The headline says it all really, doesn’t it? A man dressed in a white ninja outfit tried to rob the Greensboro, North Carolina Apple Store this morning by smashing through the plate glass facade with his Honda. How do you think that went for him?

While most of the mystery of Apple’s North Carolina data super center comes from the fact that we’re still not really sure what Cupertino will be using it for, let’s not underestimate another contributing factor to the intrigue: the fact that Apple’s Maiden, North Carolina data center appears as a big, gaping hole in the Earth under Google Maps. But no longer!

Apple’s North Carolina data supercenter is soon to go live, but it will sadly have to do so without the man most largely responsible for its creation: Apple’s Global Data Center Director Oliver Sanche passed away of a heart attack on Thanksgiving Day.