Specifically located in the Catawba River valley region, the 100,000 square foot facility, being built on around 225 acres of land, will run Google's "distributed computing utilities" including the Bigtable database system, the MapReduce parallel processing application and Google's Global File System, which help power the company's global search engine as well as applications like Gmail.

Google hasn't disclosed how many servers are in the facility or what hardware vendors it is working with. However, it says the data center likely won't be complete until the end of 2009, even though it expects to begin powering up search and applications for customers later this year.

According to eWeek, Andy Johnson, manager of global data center development for Google, says one notable detail is the Lenoir data center isn't sitting on a riverbank the way many of its predecessors do to more easily draw water to cool the machines inside.

Instead, the facility will be piping in water from local reservoirs and other water supplies in the Catawba River valley, while the ambient air in the mountain location will also help cool the data center.

Although it's still undetermined when the launch will be happening, Google is believed to be opening a similar facility soon in Goose Creek, South Carolina, says eWeek.

Google is in the midst of aggressively expanding its data center footprint and over the past year we have reported on several data center announcements from the search engine giant. Although nobody knows for sure how many data centers Google has, Data Center Knowledge says the conventional wisdom is that Google has dozens of data centers, with at least 15 significant facilities, completed or under construction, in the US, and at least another five in Europe.

Last month, Google was sued by one of the users of its AdSense program, who claims he was deceived and unfairly charged for ads displayed on third-party sites through the program.