Robert Williams (crispysilicon.delete@this.gmail.com) on October 8, 2018 6:30 pm wrote:
> https://www.theinformation.com/articles/inside-apples-cloud-infrastructure-troubles
>
> You'll know when you see it.

I'm not sure what your point is. It's well known that Apple outsources SOME of its data center workload (probably pure storage); in the past this was to Azure, in 2018 it appears to have switched to Google.

Less well known (apparently) is that Apple has at least 7 data centers in the US, and one in Denmark scheduled to open early next year. (Since NIMBYism has killed the one planned for Ireland, I guess either they will find a more congenial location elsewhere in Europe, or Viborg will be expanded soon.) There's also one in China with a second due to open next year.
(Amusingly enough the newest one in the US is in Arizona, in the building that used to house the infamous GT Advanced sapphire plant...

https://9to5mac.com/2018/08/15/look-inside-apple-data-center/
If we take seriously the map on the screen in one of those photos, there are more "facilities of interest to data center staff" than I have listed, but I don't know what those are.
This seems to be a screen that was not scrubbed by the censors. The next photo shows what I expect are HIGHTLY unlikely to be the working screens of the data center personnel, unless their jobs are to run Photoshop and Ookla Speedtest!

In addition Apple has scheduled $10B for data centers over the next five years. (I can't tell if that's only US expenditure or world-wide --- it may be US-only because the announcement was made in the context of hoopla about tax holidays and repatriation of foreign earnings.)

Point is, it would be extremely misleading to assume that Apple is in any way retreating from data centers