In 2011, Apple owned 584 acres of land.

As of this year, and according to the Financial Times, the company now owns about 7,376 acres. 

Apple uses its “facilities and land for corporate functions, R&D and data centres.” The latter would include server farms for its various online services, such as iMessage, Apple Music, and the App Store.

It can be easy to think of “the cloud” and the online services we use every day as existing only in some ethereal world up in the sky or in a distant land.

But the reality is that these services have very real physical space requirements. The above chart begins to speak to that.