Well, maybe not your HPC datacenter, but they are definitely lining up to run big enterprise datacenters, and $19B business in 2008. From an article at The Register
Thanks to a bunch of acquisitions, AT&T has offered application hosting services and application management services and sold networking services for quite a while. And with the RIM (remote infrastructure management) service announced this week, AT&T is leveraging the expertise it has running some of the largest data centers in the world, deploying its tools and know-how into data centers owned by third parties.
…AT&T is offering to design, deploy, and maintain the server, storage, and networking gear at a customer site, providing three levels of service with three different price bands. The deals also have provisions to have AT&T babysit the gear and send in technicians to repair or upgrade gear, and the AT&T BusinessDirector portal that enterprise customers use to monitor their AT&T managed services has been tweaked so it can see servers and storage.
AT&T is also pimping its cloud solution these days (though it apparently does not use the word “cloud” at all)
AT&T is not just interested in running your data center. Last August, as part of a $1bn investment in its global computing network last year, the company announced a utility-style computing platform called Synaptic Hosting, which is based on technology created by USinternetworking.