AT&T will invest $1 billion in 2009 to continue building out its global network.

The company's is spending on network and data center infrastructure to deliver services such as managed hosting, network based applications, content delivery and management and telepresence.

In the hosting and utility computing space, AT&T is increasing data center hosting capacity in Atlanta, Annapolis and the New York/New Jersey metropolitan area in the United States, as well as in Hong Kong, Tokyo and the United Kingdom.

AT&T manages data centers with more than 2.6 million square feet of secure hosting capacity in 10 countries.

The company is growing the AT&T Synaptic HostingSM platform in recently announced super IDCs in Singapore, Amsterdam and three sites within the United States. Increasing the level of automation for delivering AT&T Synaptic Hosting services as we continue to drive down implementation cycle times for our customers.

The investment also includes continued integration of IBM's global network operations under the two companies'expanded agreement.

see www.datacenterdynamics.com web feature for full details of AT&T's spending plans