Apple’s (AAPL) plans to build a North Carolina data center will result in a massive facility that could signal its next big initiative, one data-center expert says.

The company announced the billion-dollar project in June, following state tax incentives aimed at it, but has said little about its goals since. On Wednesday, an Apple spokeswoman said, “We’re looking forward to beginning construction on our new data center in Maiden, N.C., in the coming weeks,” but declined further comment.

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Google’s (GOOG) Eric Schmidt “resigned” from Apple’s (AAPL) board because Chrome and Android were encroaching on Apple’s core business, or so Steve Jobs says. But what if the opposite were true? What if Apple is encroaching on Google’s core business? Later this month, Apple is expected to break ground on a massive new data center in Maiden, North Carolina.

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Speed is critical for the growing number of traders who rely on algorithms to detect market shifts. So NYSE Euronext is building two new data centers that the exchange hopes will allow it to process trades faster than its rivals.

The new data centers are being built outside of London and New York City, and are scheduled to open in 2010. When they do, the NYSE will have an advantage with “the most obsessive traders,” says Steve Rubinow, NYSE’s chief information officer.

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Until three weeks ago, few people outside corporate data centers knew much about deduplication technology, which makes data storage more efficient by culling repetitive documents. That changed when data storage companies NetApp (NTAP) and EMC (EMC) got into a bidding war last month for a leading provider of the heretofore obscure software.

Their target is Data Domain (DDUP), for which EMC is offering $30 a share and NetApp $25 a share. While the clash surprised people who don’t know about the technology, it was no shock for Darren Thomas, who heads Dell’s (DELL) data storage division. “We always knew” that deduplication was hot, he says.

This week, Dell jumped into the fray when it announced a new deduplication box that combines technology from software maker CommVault (CVLT) with Dell hardware. The new product – along with new deduplication services that Dell is offering – may give a hint into the company’s M&A strategy, which has been taking shape in recent months.

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International Business Machines is pushing ahead with “cloud” computing technology–storing information and running applications in shared computing facilities, connected to users over the Internet.

IBM (IBM) last month tacked on an additional role to Erich Clementi, its vice president for strategy. He’s now also general manager, enterprise initiatives, with responsibility for Blue Cloud, IBM’s name for cloud computing.

“Since customers are looking for new economics, this might be a good moment for clouds,” Mr. Clementi, 50 years old, said in an interview. He described his area of operations as “a new way of delivering IT as a service,” that can be cheaper and simpler than adding capacity in a data center.

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Microsoft is about to take trailer park computing, or, as The Register has dubbed it, white trash computing, to its logical and necessary conclusion. The company’s next generation of utility data centers will take the form of–you guessed it–trailer parks: sprawling, roofless parking lots in which all the components–server clusters, power units, security systems–will be prefabricated off-site, packed into containers or other types of “modules,” trucked in, and plopped down on the ground as needed. All employees at the new centers will be required to wear wifebeaters and carry around 30-packs of Busch Light.

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Google (GOOG) is pondering a floating data center that could be powered and cooled by the ocean. These offshore data centers could sit three to seven miles offshore and reside in about 50 to 70 meters of water.

The search giant filed for a patent in February that was approved Aug. 28. The patent outlines a concept that would not only be savvy engineering, but deliver great returns. Rich Miller at Data Center Knowledge called Google’s patent a “startling new take on data center engineering.” I’d call it brilliant engineering, but the financial engineering could be even more impressive.

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I’ve received a few more hints about the big cloud-computing initiative Microsoft may be about to announce, perhaps during the company’s Mix08 conference in Las Vegas this coming week. One of the cornerstones of the strategy, I’ve heard, will be an aggressive acceleration of the company’s investment in its data-center network. The construction program will be “totally over the top,” said a person briefed on the plan.

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Web-site outages have never been more public. When a site or service goes down, companies are using blogs to rapidly update their users about what happened and why. The inevitable finger-pointing takes place in real time, and within a matter of minutes, a server failure can generate a headline on TechCrunch or Valleywag. This creates a challenge for Web hosts and data-center providers whose business is built upon a reputation for reliability. In this fast-moving environment, how do you balance the need to be accountable to customers and also work to mitigate headline risk?

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