Apple is further gearing up to fall in line with President-elect Donald Trump’s demand to make hardware products in the United States. It is now planning to manufacture ‘high-tech’ data center components and servers at the Mesa, Arizona facility, reports Business Insider. These servers aren’t expected to be exported or sold to individual consumers but will be employed at other Apple facilities in the country.
The details of these manufacturing plans were released via a regulatory filing, which was filed in mid-2016 and made public in the Federal Register on Monday. It states that Apple is looking for approval from the US Foreign-Trade Zones Board to build ‘finished products’ in the Mesa special zone. The company plans to manufacture, as the filing mentions, ‘finished server assembly cabinets’ as well.
The Cupertino giant already has permission to manufacture consumer electronic components at the Arizona facility. But it is now planning to expand and include the building of complete hardware products at the same. If Apple is granted approval then it will be exempted from a variety of customs duty payments, which are levied on the import of data server components.
The regulatory documents filed by the city of Mesa on behalf of Apple reads as under:
Apple Inc has repurposed the site as a global data command center that will conduct high-tech manufacturing of finished data center cabinets for other data centers.
Whereas Apple has also talked about the same in June, stating,
The nature of the product is not for end users but for other global data centers what will be supported from the site.
Prior to Apple reviving the Arizona factory, it had been leased to a third-party supplier who made sapphire screen coverings. The company applied for exemptions when the same went bankrupt and it took over to store iCloud and iTunes backups. The report further adds that the Cupertino giant plans to employ the server produced at the Mesa facility at its other data centers in Oregon and North Carolina.
Also, the details in the filings can be corroborated due to the fact that Apple has been hiring new staff to fill places at the Mesa facility. Since last October, the company has hired more than 150 employees, including dedicated executives for the facility. This also reiterates their focus on growing the burgeoning cloud infrastructure and business.
