Yeah, sorry; I said "real estate" when what I should probably have said was "Physical ownership and plant maintenance." Owning and operating a datacenter is a

Yeah, sorry; I said "real estate" when what I should probably have said was "Physical ownership and plant maintenance." Owning and operating a datacenter is a whole kettle of fish that they don't want to get into if they don't need to. The real estate taxes (wherever they set it up) will matter, but the larger costs are likely to be in day-to-day operation, upgrading and maintaining hardware (and the entire process for that), dealing with actual natural disasters like a flood (or a bird flying into a transformer house and blowing power to N% of the datacenter, which means they need a backup generator, which means they need to test and maintain the backup generator, etc., etc.). There's definitely a break-point where it's cheaper to pay someone else (in Apple's case, multiple someone-else's) to deal with that hassle.