AT&T announced Tuesday that it will provide cloud computing services, following a planned $1 billion investment in data centers located in the United States, Europe and Asia. One of the first customers of the new web services is the U.S. Olympic Committee, whose official Web site is powered by AT&T's service. It appears that the organization is preparing for the traffic surge during the Beijing event this month.

This type of temporary necessity is one of the many advantages of cloud computing services. What AT&T's service means to customers like the U.S. Olympic Committee is that they can rent powerful computing muscle for a determined period of time without going through any of the hassles and costs of acquiring and administering the actual hardware.

AT&T has 38 IDCs, or Internet data centers, spread across the globe, and will add more. However, most of the load will be handled by five main IDCs: Piscataway, N.J.; San Diego; Annapolis, Md.; Singapore and Amsterdam.

The announcement comes days after Hewlett-Packard, Intel, and Yahoo announced Tuesday their joint project, The HP, Intel, and Yahoo Cloud Computing Test Bed. That is exactly what it is, an open-source project with data centers around the globe to enable large-scale research of cloud computing.

IBM is another major player in cloud computing. Last October, Google and IBM announced a joint investment of about $20-25 million in what is known as “cloud computing”, a type of data center that uses parallel computing and virtualization to maximize computing power per server.