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A Central Oregon television station has broken the news that Apple is building a data center on a 160-acre parcel of land in Prineville, already home to Facebook’s massive LEED gold facility.

A report by OregonLive in December 2011 suggested Apple had toured Facebook’s Prineville facility, though Apple did not confirm the news.

Yesterday’s KTVZ report, however, said Apple had confirmed it had purchased the Prineville site, bought from Crook County for U$5.6m. Until now, the project has been labelled as nothing more than Project Maverick on official government documents.

Apple has been expanding its data center operations in recent times to make way for its iCloud services, and much of this has had a green focus. Just yesterday Apple announced in its annual environmental report that it will be setting up a solar array at its newly built Maiden data center, in North Carolina.

Rural Oregon has plenty to offer to mega-data centers. The primary benefits are relatively cheap power, mild climate and a favorable tax environment.

Both Facebook and Google (which has a data center in The Dalles, Oregon) have been taking advantage of tax breaks for data centers local governments put in place for economic development purposes.

The local tax breaks were recently a subject of dispute, when the state's Department of Revenue assessed data center properties, ignoring the county incentives. After a number of tech companies - including Facebook and Google - complained, the department quickly put in place a temporary change of rules to allow county governments to honor their agreements with the companies and started the process to make the change permanent.

Legislation that addresses the issue is also quickly moving through the Oregon Congress.