Apple has asked permission to build "high-tech manufacturing" and a data-centre server in a Mesa, Arizona, facility.

While this would be rather good for those who want to see Apple making stuff in the US and providing the country with more jobs, it appears that it is another way of avoiding taxes.

A notification published in the Federal Register on Monday said Apple was looking for approval from the Foreign-Trade Zones Board to produce "finished products" in a special zone that exempts it from customs duty payments.

"Apple has repurposed the site as a global data command centre that will conduct high-tech manufacturing of finished data centre cabinets for other data centres," the document filed by Mesa on behalf of Apple.

The Arizona effort would mark a rare instance of a US tech company manufacturing and assembling a finished product domestically, where labour costs are higher. Apple's effort appears limited to equipment for its internal operations, rather than for a mass-market consumer product.

Apple appears to be acting rather strangely in regards to data centres. It has some rather big ones in the US already and several reports have suggested that they are nowhere near full capacity. In fact early reports even suggested they were not being used at all.