Will Apple or Facebook, both gay-friendly, build a $1.2 billion 'Project Edge' data center in homophobic Nebraska or LGBT-friendly Iowa?

The Des Moines Register thinks either Apple, whose gay CEO is one of its worst-kept secrets, or gay-friendly Facebook may be scouting locations for a $1.2 billion "Project Edge" data center in Iowa, which protects LGBT employment rights statewide and allows same-sex marriage, or in heterosexual-supremacist Nebraska, which has constitutionally banned gay marriage, civil unions and domestic partnerships for 11 years and which is currently considering a Tennessee-style bill (LB912) to ban all Nebraska cities from granting employment and public accommodation rights to their gay citizens.

Facebook's Oregon data center. Photo: IntelFreePress/Flickr

Nebraska state senators are falling all over themselves in a rush to pass two bills of tax-break boutique legislation to lure a company they won't identify to their constituents, who will be subsidizing the creation of as few as 30 jobs with millions of dollars in tax and utility rate concessions.

Although Apple is strongly suspected, it is supposed to be looking hard at locations in Oregon as an opposite-coast backup to its North Carolina data center. If true, we could see a rerun of the 1995 Micron debacle in which the Nebraska legislature groveled in exactly the same way it is now, only to find out that the company they were courting ended up in Sandy, Utah, and was just jerking the Unicameral's chain.

Some people think Facebook's $6 billion May IPO is to raise money for infrastructure, although the company already makes $1 billion in profit per year.

CBS News has reported on the competition between Iowa and Nebraska to attract the facility.

Here is what the website Data Center Knowledge had to say:

So who is the prospect? No obvious answers emerge. The field of prospects is narrowed by the scope of the project and the the fact that three of the huge companies best known for secretive site selections – Google, Microsoft and Yahoo – already operate major data centers in the region. Google and Microsoft each have facilities in Iowa, while Yahoo has its data center in La Vista.

     ...One possible candidate is Apple, especially given its $1billion investment in its new data center in North Carolina. As we’ve noted several times previously, it’s likely that Apple will need at least one other large data center complex to provide backup capabilities for the facility in North Carolina. With $98 billion in cash, Apple has the means to fund large infrastructure projects to pursue its cloud computing ambitions.