DALLAS — AT&T has struck a deal to sell 31 data centers to Brookfield Infrastructure Partners, an operator and owner of infrastructure assets.
The $1.1 billion deal, if approved, will lead to the Brookfield takeover of 18 data centers in the US and 13 internationally, creating a new wholly-owned company to operate the facilities. The two companies will work under a joint marketing agreement to sell and resell AT&T services, including AT&T NetBond for Cloud, AT&T FlexWareSM and AT&T’s cloud and data center consulting, according to datacenterdynamics.com.
AT&T will continue to deliver services from the data centers, as well as more than 320 other facilities.
In 2016, Verizon sold its data centers to Equinix for $3.6 billion. CenturyLink sold 57 data centers for $2.3 billion to a consortium now known as Cyxtera.
AT&T has taken steps to decrease its reliance on its own infrastructure: In 2016, it announced a multi-year “strategic relationship” with Amazon Web Services to link business customers to AWS over its high-speed secure virtual private network NetBond (later followed by other providers, including Google), and said that it would run its applications on IBM’s cloud, according to the same article.
