Apple and Facebook Flash Forward to Computer Memory of the Future

 If you hire a plane, you can fly over the massive data center Apple operates in the woodlands of North Carolina, snapping some distant photos of the 500,000-square-foot facility that drives the company’s iCloud web services. And if you’re on foot, you can get a little closer. You might even sneak a peek at the solar farm or the biogas plant that helps power this internet engine room. But Apple won’t let you inside the building — and it won’t tell you what you might find there.

It would be nice to know. Like Google and Amazon, Apple delivers web services to hundreds of millions of people across the globe — at last count, iCloud served over 250 million souls — and that requires a whole new breed of hardware and software, stuff that’s far more efficient than the gear inside most data centers. You can think of this as the technology of tomorrow. As the web continues to grow, the tech used by the Apples and the Googles will trickle down to the rest of the world. In many cases, it already has.