Skip to main content

Apple invests nearly a billion bucks in California solar farm

Apple company logo
Image used with permission by copyright holder
Looking for projects to spend its mountains of money on, Apple CEO Tim Cook said Tuesday the tech behemoth intends to lay down nearly a billion bucks for the construction of a gargantuan solar farm in Monterey, California.

Speaking at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference in San Francisco, Cook described the plan as the company’s “boldest, biggest, most ambitious project” to date.

Working with solar panel maker First Solar, the completed 1300-acre farm will provide enough energy to power Apple’s California operations, including its under-construction ‘spaceship’ headquarters,’ which should be ready to welcome employees as early as next year.

Keen to highlight his company’s green credentials, Cook told his audience, “We know in Apple that climate change is real. The time for talk is passed – the time for action is now.”

Arizona-based First Solar said work on building the new solar farm is set to begin around the middle of this year and should be completed by the end of 2016. It described the deal with Apple as “the largest agreement in the industry to provide clean energy to a commercial end user.”

Environmental group Greenpeace responded positively to the news of Apple’s investment, saying in a statement: “It’s one thing to talk about being 100 percent renewably powered, but it’s quite another thing to make good on that commitment with the incredible speed and integrity that Apple has shown in the past two years.”

It added that while Apple still had work to do to reduce its environmental footprint, “other Fortune 500 CEOs would be well served to make a study of Tim Cook, whose actions show that he intends to take Apple full-speed ahead toward renewable energy with the urgency that our climate crisis demands.”

The news of Apple’s $850 million investment in the Monterey solar farm comes just a week after it said it’d be spending a sizable $2 billion on converting its failed sapphire plant in Mesa, Arizona into a brand new data command center, which’ll also be powered by a solar farm.

Editors' Recommendations

Trevor Mogg
Contributing Editor
Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…
This AI cloned my voice using just three minutes of audio
acapela group voice cloning ad

There's a scene in Mission Impossible 3 that you might recall. In it, our hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) tackles the movie's villain, holds him at gunpoint, and forces him to read a bizarre series of sentences aloud.

"The pleasure of Busby's company is what I most enjoy," he reluctantly reads. "He put a tack on Miss Yancy's chair, and she called him a horrible boy. At the end of the month, he was flinging two kittens across the width of the room ..."

Read more
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more